


A Beautiful and Bracing Land

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011), The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Always-a-Girl Marcus, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Colonialism, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fake Marriage, Genderswap, Hurt/Comfort, Intercrural Sex, Merged Adaptations (Book and Movie), Military, Mistress/slave, Period-Typical Sexism, Quests, Roman Britain, Rule 63, Scars, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 13:15:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6705802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flavia Aquila, daughter of the <i>primus pilum</i> of the ill-fated Ninth Legion, was herself a centurion — until she was wounded at Isca Dumnonorium and her secret discovered. Nearly two years later, she rides into the wild North of Britannia to learn what happened to her father, his Legion, and its Eagle standard. Alongside her rides Esca, the fierce, loyal, and strangely beautiful slave whose life she saved at the Games at Calleva and whom her uncle bought for her. Beyond the Wall, their relationship will change profoundly — and Flavia will learn what became of her father and his men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Calleva

When Flavia had lived in Rome, in those few unhappy years between girlhood and warriorhood, she’d attended the Games at the Colosseum one afternoon. Swords and the wielding thereof had always intrigued her to a degree deemed unbecoming in a young maiden. Watching the gladiators fight, she’d thought, would be fascinating, perhaps educational, and would take her mind for a while off her blithering idiot of an aunt. And off her uncle-by-marriage, he whose sour frown at the idea of having to find Flavia a husband didn’t keep him from surreptitiously fondling her arse now and again when he passed her in the _ala_.

She’d hated the Games.

There was skill in the arena, no doubt. But there was no honour. The men didn’t fight for principle or for practise; they fought to assuage the blood-lust of the crowd, whose collective cries made them sound one giant, ravening beast. Two men who had become close in the barracks might be forced to face one another, each either to die or to hack his friend into bits. The winner, such as he was, might someday receive a wooden sword with a gaudy coat of paint… and then what, after his envious mates bought him a few rounds of drinks at a _taberna_? His “freedom” to become someone’s hired brute, live only marginally less dangerously and for small pay, and die young?

And those were just the gladiators. When they’d brought out the first wild beast, she had risen before her gorge could, and left.

The arena at Calleva Atrebates was much smaller, its crowd a bit less rowdy. The townsfolk dressed more warmly, and the tribesfolk didn’t bother with Roman garb. People ate more roasted chestnuts than sweets and chased them with as much beer or mead as wine. But the air vibrated with the same garrulous excitement, the same shouting of bets, the same half-drunken quarrels, the same avarice for blood. And, after months of being shut up within four walls, Flavia felt as unprotected in the wide open half-circle as if she stood on the sands in the desert outside Judaea facing down Bar-Kochba’s men alone.

“Chestnuts, _dulcis?”_ Old Flavius Aquila held a few out to her in his palm.

“No, thank you, uncle.” She’d no appetite. She wondered why she’d agreed to this outing at all.

He frowned. “You’ve grown thin, lass. It’s worrisome, especially in one who is unable to take much exercise. I expect you will tuck into Sasstica’s dinner tonight.” The last sentence was not an expression of hope, she knew, but an order.

“Yes, uncle,” she said, knowing she would probably pick at the food yet again. Poor Sasstica; the slave tried so hard to cater to Flavia’s palate. Flavia, who’d once happily subsisted on _bucellatum_ and sour wine. She always smiled and complimented Sasstica on the table she set, for old Aquila was kind to his slaves and she would follow his example under his roof. But a plate left mostly full doesn’t lie.

Suddenly the cymbals crashed and the trumpets blared, and the din of conversation plunged into stillness. When the trumpets sounded a second time, the gates on either side of the arena were dragged open. Out of one marched a right brute, tall and broad as an oak; his thighs themselves might have been tree-stumps. The thick muscles under the skin of his arms and breast as he brandished his sword and buckler rippled like those of a great cat, but nothing else was feline about this man. Though his skin was olive, the iron helm and mask over his head and face made it impossible to tell what nation he hailed from. Judging by the cries that rose anew in the stands, this man was a champion, well liked in Calleva.

And out of the other gate… Flavia’s heart rose into her throat and lodged there. 

The champion’s opponent was clearly a Briton, pale-skinned and bronze-haired, with blue warrior-inkings that snaked over his bared breast and right arm. _Taken in war, no doubt,_ she thought. He was powerfully built, but he was not tall. He wore nothing but braccae; no helm protected his face, a compellingly angular one that displayed both fierce pride and sullen anger. Against other gladiators, he might have stood a chance. Not against this one, Flavia thought. This would be no fair fight — it would be _venatio,_ and the smaller man no _bestiarus_.

The Briton hesitated. One of the arena-master’s men, standing behind him, shoved him forward with a hand between the shoulder blades. The Briton turned his head to give the shover a baleful look. Then he faced forward and walked slowly toward the larger gladiator, holding his sword and shield before him as if he’d never held either before.

And then he stopped, stood in place, and dropped his hands to his sides.

”Fight me!” the champion snarled. People in the crowd began to jeer, echoing the command. The smaller man neither spoke nor raised his weapons nor moved at all. Flavia leaned forward, wondering what his game was.

The champion rested the tip of his sword against the Briton’s chest — and the Briton, staring defiantly upward at him, tossed his own sword and buckler to the ground.

Flavia’s heart began to pound. This man meant to die.

The crowd was grumbling. They hadn’t paid to see this nonsense. The champion, with a sneering laugh, drew back his gloved fist and drove it into the Briton’s jaw. To cheering from the stands, the Briton tumbled face-down into the dirt.

After a moment, he rose — almost gracefully, Flavia thought — and walked right up to the outstretched point of the champion’s sword. His expression was all contempt now as he lifted his head to stare into the other man’s eyes.

Flavia sat up a bit straighter on the bench. Something in the angle of his head, the line of his jaw, brought back flashes of Isca Dumnonorium to her. Men who, though they slept in cramped dirt-floored roundhouses and had no letters and likely had never seen a great city in their lives, bore themselves like emperors of the woodland. Fierce, worthy enemies, like their kin the Gauls had been, before the latter had developed a thirst for civilisation.

The champion held the sword close to the other man’s cheek. The Briton did not so much as flinch. Flavia did that for him as he went down again under the huge man’s fist.

This time it cost him more effort to try to regain his feet, but the brute didn’t give him the chance. Before the Briton could get his knees full under him, another blow, this one to the back of his skull, laid him face-down on the ground once again. The crowd bayed.

The champion prodded him with the sword-tip, and the Briton rose, staggering now, gasping for air, splattered with mud. His right eye was turning black; blood streamed from a cut above it, and his lips were as red as those of a _lupa_. But he turned and faced the champion once more, though he wavered now on his feet. This time the brute’s punch laid him flat on his back.

There he lay, chest heaving under the welter of outlandish blue marks, as the champion strutted about, sword held high. And then came the forest of outstretched arms, thumbs pointed down, and the shouts:

“Kill him!”

“Do it!”

“Finish him off!”

“Death!”

The crowd took up the last word and shouted it, over and over. The champion’s blade-point hovered a few thumbs’-breadths over the Briton’s heart; he moved it back fractionally as the fallen man’s chest continued to heave. He would wait, Flavia knew, for the crowd to work itself into the frenzy of a maenad before he granted them their wish and drove the point home.

It was then she decided this could not happen. She’d already seen oceans of blood pour from men, good men, Roman and not Roman. But war was a necessary if cruel thing. The titillation of a callous crowd was not.

She shot to her feet. Her right leg half-buckled under her. She grasped the rail with her left hand, thrust her right thumb toward the sky, and bawled, _“Life!”_

“Flavia?” old Aquila asked softly.

She didn’t answer him. As the calls for death faltered about her, she shouted once more, “Life! Get your thumbs up, you fools! _Life!”_

She couldn’t tell if they were responding to the centurion she had once been, or they were simply confounded by the sight of a mannish _romana_ standing for the wretched life of a painted savage. But, one by one, the thumbs all about her reversed themselves, and the beast made of a thousand human souls took up her cry: “Life! Life! Life!”

The man on the ground, his awareness having dawned that he was not to die there today, turned to look at her.

And of a sudden it were as if they were alone, he on the ground and she in the stands, in the arena.

She had seen men shoulder great pain and gasp in mortal relief before, many times before — she had done both herself not a few. But there was more in this man’s great grey-blue eyes than that. There was surprise. There was a sort of anger, too, though perhaps it wasn’t aimed at her.

And there was something else. Something she couldn’t name.

The gladiator would be pretty enough with a wash and fresh clothing and with his cuts and bruises healed, she supposed. But she’d looked at men before, pretty or rugged or somewhere in between, and sadly rued that they could never be hers while she lived as a man herself. Not one of them had ever made the hair stand up on her nape and arms, or shot an arrow of fire directly into her belly while the bowl of the sky spun round her head.

***

On her way home with Stephanos — old Aquila had said something about catching another magistrate he’d espied in the crowd for a brief conversation — she shrugged off the giddy reaction as borne of fatigue and pain. The late-autumn air bit marrow-deep into her bad thigh to start with, and leaping to her feet had strained it.

Of course, too, there had been the excitement of the moment, invigorating her as she hadn’t been in months, since launching herself at a British death-machine and falling under its spiked wheels. Saving this man’s life had felt right, somehow. The way it had felt to save her men at Isca Dumnonorium. She’d dive at that chariot all over again, even after all that happened in its wake.

But once the surgeon had found that she was no man, her days with the Army were numbered. Oh, they praised her for being _like_ a man, they gave her the armlet to honour her sacrifice, they even gave her a bit of money — though, of course, less than they’d have given a man who’d done the same thing.

They would never give her back her life. _Real_ life, as a man, as a citizen. Not as a pampered thing kept within the walls of a fine house, waiting for a marriage proposal to redeem her from that half-existence. If ever that happened. Not that she longed to be a proper Roman matron; it was only that she couldn’t live forever on her uncle’s largesse.

But they couldn’t take the victory at Isca away from her, ever. Nor the fact that, today, she’d saved one more man. Even if, as she limped back into the house, the exhilaration were rapidly fading along with the pallid sunlight and whatever scant warmth it had brought to the day.

She settled heavily, with no grace whatsoever, onto a couch in the atrium, and there she sat in sombre thought until a querulously spoken “Wine, _domina?”_ intruded. She looked up to see Sasstica hovering at her elbow, a cup in her hand.

“Yes, please,” she said with gratitude, taking the cup. She could have poured and mixed her own wine, but just now she was depleted, in body and in soul, and it was no great hardship to be waited upon. Sadly, the wine was far too watered for her taste. Before long, her days of drinking men twice her size under the table would be behind her, too.

“Thank you, Sasstica,” she said. She had never before thanked a slave before meeting her uncle, half a year ago. Did one thank one’s horse for bearing one into battle, one’s sword for drawing blood? But she’d noted that his ways had engendered fierce devotion in his slaves, and so she sought to shield them as well as him from the edge of her temper. Without marching and fighting and hard chores to dull that edge, it was no easy task.

 _“Domina,”_ Sasstica said, less deferentially than proudly, before striding back to the kitchen.

Flavia closed her eyes. The memory of what had happened today might never leave her, but the flush of it was entirely gone. The house seemed to close round her tightly again. And it would be worse when the first snows fell.

“Flavia? Do you sleep?”

“No, Uncle,” she said as her eyes flew open and she noted that he had not entered the atrium alone. “I was merely thinking.” She sat up straight — and blinked hard, schooling her features. The smaller gladiator stood at old Aquila’s side.

“This, _dulcis,_ is Esca,” her uncle said.

The man’s eye was still blackened, of course, and his face still lacerated. But he’d been bathed since the fight, and he wore a clean if rather worn and plain tunic, the sinuous blue lines on his right upper arm tendrilling out from beneath it.

He stared back at her with a lack of expression typical of slaves. He should have lowered his glance, but it didn’t surprise her that he did not: He’d wound up in the arena, after all, and not as a champion but as a chunk of beast-bait. Perhaps, she thought, that was why he bore such a name.

“You bought him as a slave?” she asked. “I have a body-slave already, Uncle, a woman. It would cause even more talk had I one who was a man.”

“Oh, I do not mean to replace Locinna with Esca,” old Aquila said with a wave of his hand. “I would not have him dress you or the like. But he could spar with you, in the peristylium, so that nobody sees. Locinna can chaperone the two of you if it would make you more comfortable. It would help strengthen your leg, and that must be done no matter what.”

“Uncle,” Flavia said quietly. “I live off your charity, you have already bought me one slave, and now you buy another. I do not wish to be a drain on your finances.”

“I’ll hear no talk of ‘draining my finances,’” the old man said sharply. “You are my kin, and you are a credit to our family, no matter what others say. And sparring with you won’t be the only thing he does. Stephanos is an excellent body-slave, but he is even older than I am and showing it. Esca can assist him, as well as help in the stable and take on other tasks meet for a strong young man. Sasstica’s sturdy enough to have been shouldering some of them, but she is also getting on in years, and I would rather she stick to managing the household as a whole and the kitchen in particular.”

Flavia’s face had gone warm when he’d called her a credit to the Aquilae. She didn’t feel like much of a credit to anyone anymore. She was, she knew, extremely lucky: She’d never met her father’s brother until she was injured at Isca and carted unawares to Calleva, and he was an eccentric sort who seemed to delight in the fact that his long-lost niece was more like a man than a woman.

“All right,” she said, her lips curving slightly.

“Good lass,” old Aquila said, reaching over to pat her shoulder. “I will leave you with him for a bit, and perhaps you can talk of fighting. Stephanos is running an errand for me; when he returns he can begin to give Esca direction.”

When had been the last time anyone had assumed she’d want to talk of fighting? Months, long months. Her smile broadened. “Thank you, Uncle. I am fortunate in you.” He smiled in return, and he took his leave.

When the door had shut behind him, she turned back to Esca — and she felt a jolt of alarm to see him reaching under his tunic. She had seen that series of movements often enough to know what it meant.

“You’ve just been bought by the kindest of owners, and you intend to cut his kinswoman’s throat?” she exclaimed. “Is that why you were sent to the arena? For killing Romans who have never harmed you?”

Esca’s face seemed to split like the sky in a lightning storm. The weapon had already appeared in his hand. She hadn’t expected him to loose it, but he did, and it slid across the floor at her. Flavia stopped it under her left heel, then bent forward to pick it up.

She fell silent as she held the dagger before her eyes. It was no _gladius_ , the weapon she preferred to wield, but it was a beautiful, deadly thing, much slenderer than a _pugio_ , its iron blade wickedly sharp. The blade was etched with interwoven swirls that echoed the whorls of ink on Esca’s arm and breast. The pommel was oddly if cunningly shaped in the form of a man raising his arms to the heavens, his body a series of rings twisting about the heft. When she grasped it, as she could not resist doing with any weapon that fell into her hands, it seemed to mold itself to her palm.

She looked up at Esca once more. His face remained tight with anger, and his voice, when he spoke, was corrosive.

“I have my honour, _domina_ , little as Rome thinks of it. I do not harm those who have not harmed me. Especially not women — even women who take up arms. Do you think all Romans are so kind that they would send a slave to the arena only were he a murderer?”

She had a vague, guilty sense she owed him an apology. But one did not apologise to a slave.

“Why do you give me this blade?” she asked instead. “It is very fine. I may be your mistress but I would not demand you turn over your dearest possessions to me.”

“It was my father’s dagger, _domina_. I give it to you as my bond. I am — I was — the son of Cunoval, who commanded five hundred spears among the Brigantes. The Romans killed them all and took me in chains. He never broke his word, while he lived, and neither do I. I despise Rome, I despise Romans — but I owe you a life-debt, and I will not break it. I am your hound, to lie at your feet.”

Flavia stared from Esca to the dagger and then back again.

“I do not ask you to make such an oath,” she said, very quietly. “To call for you to live was its own reward for me. There is very little I can do anymore, or am allowed to do. But I could do that.”

She thought it would placate him, but, instead, offense flared anew in his eyes. She had never seen eyes so pale catch such fire before.

“So, _domina_ , you took my death from me, not for the sake of me myself, but for your own sake. To make yourself feel … less weak?”

She could feel fire in her own eyes, and burning in her throat and her gut. Bracing a hand on the couch, she rose, straightening her spine. She was of a height with Esca, possibly a hair’s breadth taller, and broad-shouldered with it, even if convalescence had softened her muscles.

“If you are not happy with your current lot, _britannice_ , I can ask for you to sent back to the damned arena, and some other brute can beat you into the sand tomorrow.”

He smiled at her; the smile was not very pleasant. “That will not happen, _domina_. Your uncle bought me. I may have sworn an oath to you, but I am his to dispose of, and he wishes that I spar with you and perform other duties for him. Thus, I will.”

Flavia grit her teeth as she returned the hostile smile. As a centurion, she hadn’t suffered her inferiors to spite her to her face. Every so often she had had to beat a man, but she had not wielded the vine-staff liberally, and she had always waited until her anger had cooled. She had preferred to earn men’s loyalty and obedience through her own deeds, by the keeping of her words.

She could not say she would not have liked to take a whip to the back of this barbarian with a tongue as sharp as his dagger. But discipline was supposed to be about shaping men, not about venting one’s own spleen. The centurions who steered the latter course were largely wretches whom no good man respected, merely feared. What’s more, Esca’s back was already latticed with scars upon scars — she’d seen as much in the arena — and evidently none of those beatings had taught him respect for his betters.

“All right, then,” she said after a brief silence. “I take it you do not fight in the manner of the Legions?”

He looked stunned for a moment. Then he laughed. “Of course not, _domina_. Why would I? I am not a Roman; I have never been in the Legions. I fight as my father and his men trained me to do: one on one, with a dagger and perhaps a buckler, not a long sword and a great shield.”

Flavia’s mouth shifted into a wry grin. “I sometimes had the inconvenience of training men out of fighting habits that were unsuited for a legionary,” she said. “It seems you will suffer a similar inconvenience for some months to come.”

This time the smile he gave her was a bit warmer, though still quite guarded. “It is all well, _domina_ , so long as you are willing to learn.”

***

The hounds had run the boar to earth by the time Esca rode up to them, trailed by Flavia. She still could not grip her mare with her thighs the way she once had. But a winter’s worth of sparring had returned some of the musculature to her sturdy frame, and she could ride adequately enough. Too, the greater exercise had whetted her appetite, and her face was no longer gaunt.

Locinna had not accompanied them, as she was supposed to. When Esca and Flavia had first begun sparring in late autumn, the slave woman had sat and watched them; after a few sessions, she had reported to old Aquila that nothing untoward was going on. As there were always tasks to help Sasstica with, the old man had agreed there was no point in Locinna continuing to chaperone her mistress in the presence of her new slave.

He’d insisted, however, that Locinna accompany them on the hunt. Flavia, who was not sure about the older woman’s ability to keep up, dismissed her for the day once they were out of her uncle’s earshot. “There is nothing Esca could do to me that you could prevent. Were he so bloody-minded he would not leave you alive to run for help, either. Here, do you take a few sesterces and do as you like in Calleva today. My uncle need not know anything of it.”

Locinna’s prematurely lined face had split in a smile, revealing several missing teeth. “Thank you, _domina_. I will hold my peace with the _dominus_.”

Now Esca leaned over the side of his horse, spear to hand. Flavia had hunted from time to time in the Army, and she could bring down game well enough. But, she thought as she watched him, she certainly didn’t bring the same degree of fluid grace to it that he did. Though it took strength to drive a spearhead into a boar that large and that furious, he made it look more like a glide than a thrust. The snuffling and grunting noises gave way to squeals and bellows, but before long the animal lay silent, blood pouring from its throat.

Esca leapt to the ground beside it. He carried with him a knife much less ornate and more workaday than his father’s. With it he began to cut into the hide, and before long steam was escaping from the cuts and the stench of innards rising into the cool late-morning air. Flavia, not having smelt it in quite some time, wrinkled her nose. 

“I’ll gather wood and build the cookfire,” she said, sliding off the mare and noting with satisfaction that only a bit of stiffness in her injured thigh marred her dismount.

“Are you sure, _domina?”_ Esca asked, slightly warily.

She nodded. “It is well. I did so regularly in the Army, and it would be good to see if I’ve lost any skill at it.”

He gave a curt nod and returned to his task. His work was quick but thorough, with as much graceful economy of movement as he’d used in the kill itself. He threw the entrails to the hounds, who tore into them with noisy enthusiasm. 

It did not take Flavia long to gather up sufficient fallen branches and twigs. Esca chose a few to whittle into spit and supports. At this task, too, he worked smoothly and quickly, and before long he was carefully guiding the spit through two large chunks of boar-flesh. Flavia sat back from the fire that he could heave the spit into place atop the supports.

They sat, for a bit, turning the spit now and again. Esca produced a skin, took a swig from it, and held it out to her. _“Domina?”_ he asked politely.

It was drink made from fermented barley, she knew from the smell. Though she’d have preferred wine, she nodded, and he passed the skin to her. She sipped at it judiciously. She’d accepted it for the other reason she’d dismissed Locinna for the day. 

Esca came to life, somewhat, when he sparred with her, whether with a hint of a smirk when he bested her or with grudging admiration when she prevailed instead. After the match, however, his face would shutter against her as tightly as when first her uncle had introduced him to her. She’d decided she wanted to go hunting for exercise, for the delight of the chase, for the feel of the wind lifting the mane of hair she had grown over the winter, longer than it had been since her girlhood. But she had hoped as well that these things would put her sullen, prickly slave at greater ease in her presence.

That hope, it seemed, would be granted. They were soon tearing into the meat with only marginally more fastidiousness than the hounds; it was rather hard to stand on ceremony when one’s face and hands were coated in grease. As they ate, they passed the skin and drained the brew. It was a rather crude drink, but, Flavia thought, it seemed to go well with the boar.

 _“Domina,”_ Esca began. She looked up at him, and he continued: “I speak out of place, I realise, but… I am curious about the woman I serve. How came you to be in the Legions?”

It was not a question she had been asked before. She’d heard all sorts of prurient ones, but never any earnest curiosity about what had driven her to choose that life.

“I ran away from the house of my aunt and her husband to join the Army when I was fourteen years of age,” she began slowly. “I was already tall for my age, especially for a girl, and broad-built and gruff-voiced to boot. I took care to let the sun burn my face a few times before that, though I was scolded for ‘spoiling my beauty.’” She gave a scornful half-laugh. “So I presented myself at the garrison as a man of eighteen years, eager to serve Rome. To the men there, that is precisely what I appeared to be. If one does not look very hard, one does not discover certain things.”

“And you were never caught out, _domina?”_ He frowned, both in perplexity and as though he were trying to frame a delicate question. “Do not the Legions…”

She gave him a crooked half-smile. “Bathe together? Shit together? I always bathed privately, using _sapo_ , water, and cloths. As for the latrines… I kept my tunic pulled down about me whilst I sat. Again, one does not see many things that one does not look for.”

“And why did you join, _domina?”_ Esca asked. “Did you not wish to wed, to bear children?”

She shrugged. “My prospects were poor. My father disappeared in action when I was ten years old, and my mother died of a broken heart not long after. The family villa was sold, and I went to live with kin who barely tolerated me. No great beauty, no money — and a disgraced family name.”

“‘Disgraced’?”

A muscle twitched along her jawline. He seemed to ask in earnest, but she wondered if he had heard the story from one of the other slaves and was hoping she might confirm it.

“My father was Marcus Flavius Aquila, _primus pilum_ of the IX Hispana.”

Esca sat up straight, his eyes widening.

“You know of the Ninth?” she asked. 

“I do, _domina_. When I was just a boy, I saw them. I hid behind a boulder and watched them march into Caledonia. I had never seen their like before — like a serpent formed of men, grey but shining, hackled with the scarlet of crests and cloaks and scarves, winding across the hills. And their Eagle caught the sun and flashed as they marched by — a great golden Eagle, looking for all the world as though it were about to dive into the gorse and snatch up a screaming hare.”

Flavia stared at him. It was more than he had ever said to her before at one time, at least without a cutting edge to his voice and a hardness in his eye.

“My father’s crest was at the van,” she said. “And that Eagle? It was lost when he and his legion disappeared in Caledonia, sixteen years gone now. Eagle lost, honour lost. And this is why the family name is in disgrace.”

“I do not understand, _domina_. Your family is in disgrace because your father lost a piece of metal?”

Flavia shook her head. “It is not merely a piece of metal. It is Rome. It is a symbol of our courage, our power, our accomplishments. It is cities, it is forts, it is aqueducts, it is basilicae, it is good roads. It is military might and wise law; it is sculpture and poetry and oratory and the art of setting a good table. No matter where we see the Eagle, we can say, ‘Rome did that.’”

Esca had tensed as she had spoken. There seemed to be a new anger in his eyes, though banked. His mouth was a hard flat line. He was silent for a moment. She waited for him to speak.

Finally he said, “I have told you, _domina_ , that my father was Cunoval. He was a clan chieftain of the Blue War Shields, among the Brigantes.”

She frowned. “The Brigantes are friends and allies of Rome, are they not?”

Esca shook his head. “The Brigantes are an enormous tribe, _domina_ , with many clans, and as much agreement among them as there is among all the tribes together. The most powerful of the clans pledged faith to Rome, true. But the Blue War Shields never did. We were always a thorn in the Legions’ side, ever since they first marched into our lands. Seven years ago, we rose against our Brigantes overlords — against Rome. But we hadn’t enough allied clans with us. We were outnumbered, and when we made our last stand we were overwhelmed.

“My two brothers died, one of them before my eyes. I almost died myself; the slavers pulled me half-dead out of a ditch. My father died as well — and my mother. She fought at his side, but she did not die in battle. She knew what the Legionaries would do to her if they took her alive, and that whoever owned her afterward would do the same. Before they won through, she knelt before my father and bid him cut her throat — and he did, with tears running down his face.”

Flavia said nothing. She knew what happened in wartime. To let soldiers use the enemy’s women as they would was, in part, their reward for soldiering. But, too, it knocked their men’s hearts out of their breasts in battle. It was hideously cruel, and it had always sickened her to hear the screams, but that was the way of war, and she could do no more than stay out of the way.

Esca, who had fallen silent, spoke again: “Rome also did that.”

To that, she had no reply.

Shortly after they washed their hands and faces in a nearby stream, gathered up what they could of their kill for drying and salting, and set out for the villa. All the time they spoke perhaps a handful of words between them. What had opened, briefly, was tightly shuttered once again.

***

The spring and much of the summer were, by and large, uneventful and tolerable. Esca sparred regularly with Flavia, who continued to gain back what convalescence had taken from her. When he was lost in the dance of battle, his hostility ebbed, and a patient teacher surfaced in him. Though he never truly lost his tight-lipped wariness when they were not sparring, over time the taut coil of anger within him had seemed to loosen.

As summer passed its midpoint, Flavia’s thigh began to trouble her more and more. At first it was but an increase in the usual dull ache that she had learned to relegate to the back of her mind. She thought it strange, in the stiflingly hot weather. But, before long, it began to abruptly wax into a piercing pain that made her catch her breath. The scarred flesh, which had dulled in colour over time, grew angry red again and was hot to the touch.

She said nothing of it. She knew she was being foolish, that troubles did not disappear when ignored, but even worse than the pain was the fear it brought, and the shame of being afraid.

If it caught her uncle’s attention, he gave no sign of it. One time she stumbled while alone with Locinna, who asked, _“Domina,_ fare you well?” Flavia’s curt affirmative discouraged her from asking the question again. Sasstica seemed too preoccupied with her duties to pay attention, and Stephanos might as well have been blind.

Keeping the matter from Esca, however, proved impossible. More than half a year of sparring between them had begotten an odd sort of intimacy: He knew her body in ways no lover could, knew how she stood and moved and guarded herself, knew how to read her face as she did any of those. And the same was true for her, of him.

It was inevitable, she thought later, that sooner or later her bad thigh would protest fiercely during a match. For a split second she was dumbfounded, her perception dulled. Her senses resharpened to reveal a baffled look of concern on Esca’s face. She took advantage of his distraction and lashed out, and he caught himself and gave back as good as he’d got. But then there was the next time, and, in a subsequent match, the next.

The fourth time, Flavia gasped audibly, and she felt her dagger tremble in her hand.

_“Domina.”_

She blinked away the fog and looked up into an intense blue-grey gaze.

“Your injury is paining you.”

“I am fine,” she said hoarsely.

“You are _not_ fine, _domina.”_ There was an edge of fear to his voice. “You hold yourself much more stiffly than you had been doing, you favor your injured leg, you continually grimace — and now you gasp aloud. I fear to bring more harm to your leg by continuing to spar with you.”

She remained silent. She considered ordering him to continue, but she realised immediately that he would hold back, and that would do her no good in a sparring partner.

“Have you told _Dominus_ Aquila—”

 _“No!”_ She was mortified to hear her own voice so high with terror. Esca looked startled; then his expression shifted back into one of concern. Before he could speak, she added, “I will be fine, Esca. I thank you, genuinely, for your solicitousness. I think perhaps you are correct in that I should take my rest. Be there nothing to help Stephanos with, your time is your own for the rest of the afternoon.”

 _“Domina,”_ he said neutrally, and turned and left the peristylium.

One night perhaps a week later, she sat in the same courtyard with her uncle, the draughts-board set up between them. The pain had addled her thoughts all day, and the scents of rose and cistus that hung heavily in the still air — scents she usually liked — cloyed in her nostrils and throat. Her game had been horrendous, she knew. And the pain made it hard for her to sit still. She tried to shift as unobtrusively as she could in her seat, so that the old man would not question her.

As he watched a bat wobble by, old Aquila asked mildly, “Is your wound troubling you much tonight?”

“No, sir.”

His eyes turned back to rest on her, and he said, in the same conversational tone, “You’re a damned liar, niece.” And then he drew back his great hand and swept all the pieces from the board, sending them clattering to the stones below.

Flavia bit her lip. “I…. did not wish to worry you.”

“You feared to ‘worry’ me? Did you prefer that, at best, the use of your leg withered away for good, and, at worst, you died of infection?”

She blew out her breath. “Did Esca tell you?”

“Do you think I needed to be told?” old Aquila snapped. “I may be old but I am not blind — do you think I haven’t seen you limping more and more this month past, or grimacing as you moved? This has gone on long enough, Flavia. I’ve an old friend at Durinum who’s a much better surgeon than the one at Isca.”

“Durinum’s a long way,” Flavia said. “Will he come?”

“Oh, he will,” old Aquila said.

And he did: a barrel-chested, blue-jowled Iberian by the name of Rufrius Galarius, one-time field surgeon for the Second Legion. Though his hands were nearly as big as old Aquila’s, they were skillful and gentle on Flavia’s inflamed thigh. Locinna stood close by, both as chaperone and to assist Galarius if need be.

After a long while, Galarius drew the light summer bed-rug back over Flavia and stood up straight; she could hear his shoulder muscles creak and pop as he did. His face was thunderous as he demanded, “Who in Typhon’s name searched that wound the first time?”

“The camp surgeon at Isca.”

“What a surprise,” Galarius snapped. “That old drunkard probably needed help to find your femur. Typical camp butcher. It’s rather miraculous he was able to discover that you had no cock.”

She flinched — not at the crude language, but at the reminder of all she had lost. Galarius seemed to notice, and his face softened as he sat on the edge of her cot and took her hand.

“My dear,” he said, “I realise this is unwelcome news, but I shall have to open your wound again and search it. I have enough opium for your recovery, but not for the surgery itself — I have been treating civilians these days, mostly, and most of the draught is sent straight to the fortresses and camps, where it is badly needed.”

Flavia could feel every drop of blood leave her face. She wanted to vomit. This was precisely what she had feared, to the point that she had been unable to admit it even to herself.

“When—”

“The first thing in the morning. The sooner it’s done with, the better. Until I do it, you’ll have no peace, and be it left undone, it may eventually kill you. I would do it now, but it is late and I am tired, and I would be well-rested and steady-handed for this.”

 _“Domine,”_ Locinna said, face and voice sharp with concern. “Will you need my help in the morning?”

“I will, I believe,” Galarius said. “But, as strong as you appear, I think I will need more than just your help.”

“And you will _have_ more than just my help, _domine,”_ Locinna replied, moving toward the door. She did not speak again, but Flavia knew where she was going, and her stomach seemed to turn over anew.

As it transpired, she would learn some time later, Esca had not been repelled or hesitant, as she had feared he would be — although why this mattered to her in a slave, she knew not. “He turned white as a cleaned bone, _domina,”_ Locinna would tell her. “And he said he would do the greater share of the work, without hesitation.”

The Army had taught Flavia to sleep anywhere, anytime, in small snatches if need be; and she had slept through both great fear and great pain before. She managed to get most of a full night’s sleep; when she blinked awake in the bright golden light of morning, she had a few moments of somnolent peace before she remembered what was to happen today and her stomach buckled again.

She was not long awake before there was a brisk rap on her door. “Enter,” she called out.

Galarius strode in, a heavy leather satchel in his hand. “Slept you well, Flavia?”

“As well as could be,” she replied.

“All you could ask the gods for, on such a night.” He deposited the satchel onto a table that had been brought into Flavia’s chamber the night before, and he opened it. She swallowed hard to see the sharp gleaming implements therein, which he began to lay out. 

“Where are Locinna and Esca?” she asked.

“They shall join us shortly. Locinna is boiling water, and Esca is gathering clean linens.”

Shortly thereafter came another knock, and then Locinna held the door while Esca bore in a steaming kettle. He set it down on the floor and exited again. Locinna came to stand by Flavia’s bedside, and she put her bony lined hand over Flavia’s without asking. 

Flavia clasped it hard, once. “I fare well, Locinna.” She smiled weakly. “Fear not for me; I have endured worse.” The slave returned her unconvincing smile and did not relinquish Flavia’s hand.

Esca returned with a pile of linen in his arms. When he set it down on the table beside the satchel, Flavia could see that it had all been torn into broad strips.

”Right,” Galarius said. In contrast to the grim expressions of both slaves, he himself looked calm and purposeful, ready to shoulder the unpleasant task that earned him his daily bread. He moved to Flavia’s side and lifted the rug, tucking it up about her hips. She wore only a _subligaculum_ beneath. 

Esca flushed somewhat and stared pointedly at the wall above her head. The surgeon jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow that was, judging from how Esca winced, surprisingly sharp in such a thickset man. “Don’t have an attack of maidenly modesty on me now, boy. I’ll need you to hold her down. You let her thrash, I’ll have _you_ thrashed.”

 _“Domine,”_ Esca replied, with the barest level of deference, his face hard.

Anger burned a small fierce hole through Flavia’s dread. _“Medice_ — he serves me well,” she said curtly. “You need not fret. I am more than capable of disciplining my slaves when it is needed.”

Both men stared at her for a moment. Esca looked away quickly; she saw movement in his throat. Galarius held her gaze for another moment longer before he nodded. “As pleases you. He is your slave, after all.” He turned to Locinna, whose own expression was carefully neutral. “You, woman — do you hold down her good leg.”

 _“Domine,”_ Locinna said, moving to the foot of the bed and sitting, facing away from her mistress. She took Flavia’s bare left foot onto her lap and held tightly onto the ankle, crossing her arms atop it to weigh it down. “Is this how you wish?”

“That is fine,” Galarius replied. “Now, you,” and he looked at Esca again. “By her side, hands on her forearms. For now.”

Silently, Esca moved to the side of the bed, sat as Locinna had, and leaned over Flavia to follow the surgeon’s instructions. Flavia nearly gave a start under his hands when she realised she had seen the look in his eyes before. It was the same look the hale gave the badly wounded after battle, to give them heart.

“Are you ready, Flavia?” she heard Galarius ask.

“I am ready,” she replied, but her eyes were locked onto Esca’s.

She wasn’t. Nobody could truly be ready to be opened up alive, with nothing to dull the pain. She was glad she had not eaten anything since late afternoon the day before, or it would have come up all over her and perhaps Esca too. She was equally glad she had used the chamberpot between her awakening and Galarius’s return.

Her eyes were wide, wider than they had ever been, but after a very short while she no longer saw Esca before her. She saw a haze of bright, pulsing whiteness, shot through with memories that danced and shifted with each searing prod of a sharp instrument in her flesh. Swords and daggers that had cut into her, fists that had connected with her cheekbones or mouth. Hunching over on the latrine during a bad bout of dysentery, trying not to scream then either. Her mother’s funeral pyre. The legionary messenger bringing word that Marcus Flavius Aquila would never return to Etruria again. Her father, stooping to caress her cheek before leaving for the last time; the great square emerald in his ring, carved with a leaping dolphin, flashing in the Etruscan sun.

She could keep, barely, from screaming, but a body in great pain seeks to move on its own, as a child with fever will rock itself. She heard Galarius bawl, “Hold her _down,_ slave! Put your weight on her, damn you!” She felt a warm, solid weight settle onto her torso, flattening her breasts and driving the breath out of her lungs — and then she saw and heard and felt nothing.

When she next stirred, her first awareness was of throbbing, strong and jarring, from the wound throughout the rest of her body. She groaned, despite herself.

She heard Galarius’s voice. “That will ease before long. I’ve a draught to help with it, before I leave.”

She pushed herself up on her elbows, gritting her teeth at the pain caused by the shift. From the light, she judged it to be early evening. The surgeon stood at the right side of her bed; Esca stood at the left, a cup in his hands. Old Aquila and Locinna were in the doorway, peering at her with concern.

”You came through well, lass,” Galarius said. “That old sot left enough splinters in your wound to quill a hedgehog, but the muscles are surprisingly whole for it. I’ll be back tonight to check on the wound again. Do you take the cup from your slave” — he indicated Esca — “and rest now.”

He took up his satchel and moved toward the doorway, speaking a quiet word to old Aquila and Locinna. They followed in his wake, though they craned their heads round on their necks for a last glimpse of her.

She looked at Esca. His face looked drawn and grey. He knelt beside the cot, setting the cup down on the floor. Then he took gentle hold of her shoulders, and she found herself with her head in the crook of his neck and left shoulder. With his right hand he picked up the cup again and pressed it to her lips.

She sipped. The bitterness of opium inside the sweetness of fresh milk brought the previous summer back to her with the force of a blow. Esca’s hand tightened on her forearm. She shook her head and paused in drinking to say, “I am well.”

The cup had been brimming, and both cream and drug lay heavily in her empty and unsettled stomach. It took a while for her to drain it all, but he sat patiently beside her until nothing remained in the cup but a thin white film, and then he rose.

“Esca,” she said, and he stilled to await her question. “Did I disgrace myself at all?”

He was silent for a moment before giving a quiet, toneless “No, _domina.”_

She nodded weakly. She could see the thick warm darkness ahead of her, like a storm-cloud on the horizon. Her last thought before it overtook her was that, though he was least likely of anyone in the house to lie to her, were he indeed lying it was a kindness for which she was grateful.

***

“Ow, Locinna,” Flavia protested.

 _“Domina,_ I am sorry, I know it is a discomfort but you must look presentable for _Dominus_ Aquila’s guest.” Locinna’s voice was coaxing and chiding at the same time.

“I should rather have another sword in me than these damned pins.” She resisted the impulse to rub at her scalp.

“Well, I should not like to stick another sword in you, _domina.”_ Locinna pinned Flavia’s braids deftly round her head. “I hear tell that this man is a legate?”

“He is,” Flavia said. “Of the Sixth Legion, up in Eburacum. Now that the roads are dry and the shipping channels clear of ice, he is journeying to Rome, where he has dealings with the Senate. In the morning he continues from here to Regnum, and thence to Dubris.”

“And he is an old friend of the _dominus?”_

Flavia wondered how much Locinna had heard from Sasstica and Stephanos. She said, “They served together in Judaea; my uncle was then First Cohort of the Fretensis, and this man was doing his year as staff tribune. Presumably there is a great difference in age between them.”

Locinna’s curiosity seemed sated, and she fell quiet except to direct Flavia to tilt her head this way or that as Locinna painted it and set a fine if simple necklace round her throat. Flavia herself fell into thought. 

Over the autumn and winter, Esca had tended her wound carefully; he seemed to have a knack for it that even Locinna did not, and before long the question of her modesty evaporated for everyone in the household. With equal care, he had resumed sparring with her. Even had she been a man, never would she have been readmitted to the Legions, not with the twist in her gait that was an impediment to long marches. Her right thigh was a mass of ugly scars that she would carry until the day she died. But now she walked and rode and fought with little hindrance. For all civilian intents and purposes, she was hale.

And that raised the question of what she was to do with herself, with her life. There was farming in the Aquila blood, just as there was soldiering. She would not mind, she thought, a life of bringing crops out of the ground, so long as she could favor her bad leg in doing so; or of tending sheep and cows and swine. But, without money, one could not start a farm.

She wondered how, precisely, she could earn such money — or even her daily bread. No one would hire a woman for the tasks she was good at, and she had no hand for the tasks deemed suitable for a woman. As she had told Esca, she had been considered no great catch as a girl, and now that she was infamous as a woman who had lived and fought alongside men for years, no decent Roman man would marry her. Sardonically, she’d wondered if perhaps she should try to earn a living on her back, but she rather doubted that a sturdy, scarred, somewhat plain _virgo intacta_ of twenty-seven years would be in demand as a whore. And, generous as her uncle was, he was not wealthy enough to set her up with her own villa. Certainly he had done enough for her as it was.

She thought, perhaps, she could disguise herself as a man again and set out somewhere that she was not known. The Empire was vast; any busy fort or town could make use of a man, or one who presented herself as a man, willing and able to shoulder hard work. Where, though, she’d no idea. With luck, she’d be able to draw out a few ideas from her uncle’s legate friend this evening without revealing her intentions.

Eventually, Locinna finished her fussy ministrations and held up the polished bronze before Flavia’s face. Flavia blinked at the stranger therein, all smooth pallor and full red lips and kohl-rimmed eyes, hemmed in between a glossy corona of braids and a string of Baltic amber, and smelling of attar of roses.

“There, _domina._ You look lovely.”

“If you say so.”

“You should let me tidy you up more often like this,” Locinna said, then looking away with a flush to her cheeks when her mistress glared at her.

As Flavia walked toward the atrium, she heard voices: her uncle’s, and that of a stranger, deep and pleasant though with a harsh, clipped accent.

“Are you sure, Aquila? I could send him up to the transit camp, if it would be a bother.”

“Don’t be a fool, Claudius. I can most certainly lodge two guests at the same time without sending one of them to the stables.”

When she emerged into the atrium, she took note of the two men standing alongside old Aquila. The taller one, standing closer to her uncle, wore the gilded bronze of a legate; the shorter one, standing behind him, was evidently some manner of staff officer. Esca was exiting the room, two cloaks over his shoulder and a crested helmet in each hand.

“Ah, _dulcis,”_ old Aquila said, looking up and noticing Flavia. “My compliments to Locinna; she has made quite the Venus of you tonight. Claudius, do you let me present to you my niece, Flavia Aquila. Flavia, this is my old and dear friend Claudius Hieronimianus, Legate of the Sixth Legion.”

Flavia fought the impulse to salute; instead, she extended her hand, and Hieronimianus clasped it. _“Domina,”_ he said, in his rich, musical voice; his smile set off a thousand fine crinkles round his mouth and eyes, like the lines in an old and well-loved vase.

He seemed to be of old Egyptian blood, his features much sharper than those of his countrymen who claimed Syrian descent. His eyes were elongated, and of a jet-black that yet seemed to glow as if the sun rose behind them. He was old enough to be her father, of course, but many a Roman woman married a man that much older; and for all that he was no longer young, he cut a hard, fit figure in the atrium.

As any well-bred Roman girl did, from girlhood on she had mastered the art of eying comely men with utter discretion. When she had lived as a man, she had finely honed that discretion, for on it rested her life. She gave Hieronimianus a smile that was warm but with no promise in it at all, all the while drinking him in. By the same token, she had no illusions that his gracious warmth toward her was borne of anything but courtesy. Likely he would show the same to any woman, even the oldest of crones.

”Do you let me introduce you to Servius Placidus, my tribune,” Hieronimianus said. The shorter man stepped forward to clasp Flavia’s hand, though he did so as gingerly as could be done without violating the rules of hospitality. She caught the subtle twist of his lips, the carefully veiled disdain in his eyes. She had a feeling that both of their guests knew of her story. She was not particularly surprised, but neither she was pleased.

Stephanos appeared in the doorway. Old Aquila looked up and said, “Ah, good. Stephanos, do you take our guests to the bathhouse, that they might soak off the dust of their travels. This may be the edge of the civilised world, but we’ve plenty of hot water, scented oil, and soft towels. Your own slaves will be awaiting you in your rooms afterward.”

A short time later, old Aquila, Flavia, Hieronimianus, and Placidus reclined about the table in the small dining nook off the atrium. It was, like the rest of the house, decorated to suit the austere tastes of a longtime soldier. Nothing hung on the white walls but, opposite the entrance, a bronze-faced cavalry buckler over a pair of crossed javelins. The four couches were spread not with the usual embroidered fabric but with finely dressed deerskins. Yet the palm-oil lamps on the table cast a soft yellow light that gave the stark little room an intimate air. And while Flavia and old Aquila typically took meals that were as Spartan as his house, Sasstica seemed to have delighted in tonight’s opportunity to put her culinary talents on display.

Throughout the first courses, Flavia did little but listen. Her uncle and Hieronimianus had many good stories, some of them even considered fit to be told in women’s company. She was also happy to have the opportunity to give the legate her full attention, even if she sometimes concentrated more on his long warm eyes or on his smile than on his words. When he fell silent to listen to old Aquila, she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

His tribune was another matter entirely. This Placidus was an Adonis, she would readily admit. She suspected Athenian heritage from his smooth oval face, the curls surrounding it, and the graceful way he carried himself. That he had a feminine streak to him was of no consequence to her; she’d fought beside many such men and had no complaints of their ferocity in battle or their loyalty to their brothers-in-arms.

What irked her was that he continued to look at her as though he’d caught a whiff of something foul, though he veiled it just enough to satisfy the demands of courtesy. Nor did she delight in his litany of complaint about Britannia: The weather was raw and cold, the people didn’t bow and scrape for their betters unless compelled, the food was bland, the wine was too often sour and the native drink barbaric, et cetera, et cetera. _Poor fellow, she thought, it must be so difficult to huddle indoors under warm furs and eat only hard-boiled eggs and fish while your ‘inferiors’ shiver in the mud and choke down tasteless_ bucellatum. No longer a centurion, she could have said the same to him with no consequences to her livelihood or her hide, but he was not worth her lowering herself to insult a guest in her uncle’s house.

Esca served them, moving silently and near-invisibly between table and kitchen. Alone among those seated at table, she darted a glance his way every now and again. Upon first sight of her his eyebrows had risen, but then he had immediately and completely retreated into the role of _servus_ , his face a mask. Before long she was disregarding him as the men round her did and focusing solely on the conversation.

Just before last course was brought out, old Aquila poured the second libation to the _lares_ , whose little bronze statues stood alongside the salt-cellars at the corners of the table. In the rich, wavering light, the Samian bowls glowed like garnets; in them, last autumn’s now-withered apples turned to pomanders of gold.

Flavia felt a prickle at her nape. She was no more superstitious than any other soldier, but she had a strong premonition that she stood on the threshold of something momentous.

Hieronimianus was saying, “You must come visit me at Eburacum after I’ve returned there, Aquila.”

“I just might,” old Aquila said, watering the Falernian in his cup. “I’ve not seen it in five-and-twenty years.”

“A long time indeed. The place is almost habitable these days,” Placidus drawled.

Aquila smiled indulgently at him. “Yes, well, that many years in one place, you’d expect the Army to have transformed a frontier outpost into something a bit more impressive.”

Hieronimianus’s dark eyes took on a faraway look. “And yet, some things have not changed at all.”

Flavia looked up sharply. “How do you mean, sir?”

The legate did not reply for a moment as he twirled his Falernian in his glass, the light picking out flames in the dark-red liquid as it shifted. Then he said, reflectively, “The ghosts of the Ninth Legion still linger there, _domina._ They left their names and numbers scratched upon the walls, they left their altars to their Iberian gods, they left the British women they loved to raise their half-Iberian children. But, more than anything else, they left the image of themselves, marching into the mists, in the minds of the people of those lands. It’s said that when the mists roll down from the high moors, one almost expects the red crests of the Ninth to come marching thunderously out of them.”

No one spoke for a long moment. The hairs on Flavia’s nape bristled again; Esca’s description of the Ninth came back to her. Her uncle’s expression was unreadable. Placidus gave a soft snort of disdain.

“Would you have any idea, sir, what might have happened to them?” Flavia asked.

The legate’s gaze sharpened upon her. “Why would this interest you, _domina?”_

“Because, sir, my father — my Uncle Aquila’s younger brother — was their _primus pilum.”_

Hieronimianus’s brows arched, and then he turned to old Aquila. “You never told me this.”

Aquila shrugged. “No? Well, perhaps it is because I was already a man grown when he was born. We never really knew one another, and I did not meet Flavia until nearly two years ago.”

“Fascinating,” Placidus said, drawing his lips back to display nearly every tooth in his head. “I suppose it is understandable that a young girl whose father had disappeared in such a … calamitous manner might seek to restore the family honour as the son he’d never had.”

Flavia had wondered throughout the earlier courses precisely when the tribune would loose such a barb. She returned the unpleasant smile with an ironic tilt of her head. _I hope your men kill you in your sleep someday,_ she thought.

Hieronimianus’s expression was sombre. “We may never know, _domina,_ but it is entirely possible that no survivors remained to bring word of the catastrophe back to the fort.”

“Do you think that likely, sir?” Placidus asked silkily. “Nearly five thousand men, and not a trace of them to be found in the last fifteen years?” He popped an olive into his mouth and sucked the flesh off, then spit the stone into his hand before continuing. “Surely it is more likely a good number of them simply deserted and blended in with the tribes — gutting their officers first, like the savages whose company they were about to join?”

Flavia’s palm itched against her cup. She purposefully stared at a spot on the wall. Let the tribune think she was standing down.

“I rather doubt that,” Hieronimianus said, his voice neutral.

“Well, sir, I defer to your superior judgment,” Placidus fairly oozed. “Certainly, given the foul odour in which the Ninth disappeared, one can understand how I might have come to such a conclusion.”

“Ever the suave one, Placidus,” Hieronimianus said. His tone was as mild as his words, but Flavia saw the viciousness in the tribune’s eyes check a little.

“What of the possibility they were ambushed, sir?” she asked carefully, training her eyes now entirely on Hieronimianus.

The legate was quiet for a moment, his face hardened in unpleasant thought. Finally he said, “Of late, there has been talk in the markets and _tabernae_ along the Wall, and at the cock-fights men hold in the Great Ditch. It goes without saying that such talk is often no more than that. But the rumours are that the Ninth did indeed fight to the bitter end — and that the Eagle has been seen in the far North, in the shrine of one tribe or another, where it is worshipped as the symbol of a god.”

Flavia froze. Rogue Legionaries, she knew, would have simply destroyed the Eagle or sunk it to the bottom of a deep river. Not set it up in a temple like a statue.

“Do you... intend to pursue these rumours, sir?” she asked carefully.

Hieronimianus shook his head and smiled ruefully. “Mere rumours? How? Oh, certainly I wish I’d more than rumour to go on: An Eagle in the wrong hands would be a potent weapon against Rome. But to send soldiers out to find it would be to instigate war, and there aren’t enough Legions in Britannia to win it.”

She paused for a moment, then asked: “But what about a solitary man?”

“The right man, certainly,” the legate said. “But not only would he have to give his entire heart to the recovery of the Eagle, he would have to be able to pass among the tribes of the North without suspicion. As the Army does not recruit men to serve in the places of their upbringings, finding a man of whom both is true would be a tall order indeed.”

***

Her uncle stared at her hard for a moment before saying, incredulously, “Are you jesting, lass?”

“Not one bit,” Flavia replied, hardening her voice to suppress a sudden heated jolt of defensiveness from it.

Old Aquila, who had seen Hieronimianus and Placidus off the morning before, shook his great white beard. “A Roman woman, an _injured_ Roman woman at that, alone in the North with no one but a painted Briton at her side?”

“I am much healed since the second surgery, and sparring with Esca has helped me regain most of my strength and sinew. And I will dress once more as a man,” she said stubbornly.

“And you trust him, that you would take him into the wild with you, where he speaks the language and you don’t?”

“He swore his bond to me.” Her voice was as hard and sharp as the dagger Esca had given her for that bond. “He will not play me false.”

“Flavia. He is a _slave._ He tells you what you want to hear because he _has_ to. When he is alone with you, out of the reach of Rome’s laws, nothing could stop him from cutting your throat and leaving you at the bottom of a glen. Or worse,” Aquila added. _“Much_ worse can happen to a woman alone.”

Flavia stole a glance at Esca, who stood impassively against the wall of the atrium. Her uncle’s words made her think of Esca’s when he had thrown his father’s dagger at her feet, now so many months ago. There was a pinkness over his sharp cheekbones, and his eyes were cold.

She looked back to the old man. “Uncle… I cannot tell you why, but I have served with many men before, led them too. I believe I judge character well. I do not think Esca will betray me.”

“You served with and led _Romans,_ dear girl, or men in the pay of Romans. These wild savages are another thing entirely!”

Flavia said nothing. She merely looked down at the tiles of the floor. When she looked up again, she said, “Uncle… what shall I do with my life? I was a poor catch from the beginning, thanks to the fate of the Ninth. Now, no respectable Roman man would have me at all. I cannot sew, nor spin, nor cook, nor do anything else meet for a woman by which I can earn my bread. You have been utterly generous to me, and I can never express enough gratitude for it… but I chafe at sitting here, month after month, with no challenges but sparring with Esca in the courtyard. I would fain take my chances in the North and, perhaps, restore the honour of the family name, rather than wither here as the months and the years go by.”

Old Aquila breathed in deeply, then released the breath in a harsh sigh.

“I fear for you, Flavia. I fear greatly for you. You are a valiant woman, but you are a woman still, and vulnerable. The world is unkind to vulnerable women. But… I doubt I shall dissuade you, or that I’d be able to keep you here against your will. And as much as I would grieve were you lost in the North, neither do I wish to return home one day and have a weeping Locinna tell me you’ve opened your veins in the bath.”

The frank words did not unsettle her at all. She was glad he spoke so to her; no other Roman man would anymore. But, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Esca flinch, though the movement was very subtle. She wondered if he’d pictured her in the bath, taking her own life with his father’s dagger.

“Thank you, Uncle. I cannot promise I will return safely to you. But, if I do, I will do so in glory, and you will be proud.”

“Niece,” old Aquila said softly. “I am already proud of you. I was proud of you before you opened your eyes in your chamber here and greeted me for the first time.”

Flavia had not cried since childhood, since her father had kissed her cheek and told her to be brave for him and walked out of her and her mother’s lives forever. She’d never wept like a lovelorn maiden over men she could not have. Tears had never pricked her eyes when she took blows in battle, nor when brave and honourable men died beside her. She did not cry or scream when the chariot-spikes bit into her — nor even, had Esca told the truth, when Galarius reopened her thigh to remove what that butcher at Isca had left behind.

Now, the tears threatened to overflow her eyes and run down her face. She dropped her head, biting the inside of her cheek and swallowing hard until they subsided.

She felt old Aquila deposit a kiss on the crown of her head. Then he straightened again, and he turned and left the atrium.

She herself stood straight up. Her eyes felt dry enough now that she could look at Esca without shame, she thought. Why did she care what a slave thought? She turned about to face him, and she saw him regarding her warily.

“Well,” she said. “We have a journey before us, and we must plan for it.”

 _“Domina,”_ he said. His expression did not change. His eyes were still cold.

”Do you speak with Stephanos and Locinna; I am sure the three of you can help kit me out as a man dressed for the climate.”

He inclined his head, as bare an acquiescence to duty as Placidus’s hand-clasp had been, and left the room.

Flavia herself did not remain in the atrium but sought out her chamber. Locinna had gone to Calleva on errands that morning. Which was all to the good. _You won’t be ‘tidying me up’ again any time soon,_ she thought as she unsheathed her knife, raised it to her head, and began to saw off lock after long, glossy black lock.


	2. Valentia

The spring came in; flowers studded the hills like gems, and the massed blooms of the thorn-trees were like one last snow-fall upon the dark hills. And Flavia and Esca rode out. They took the north-west road toward Corinium, whereupon they gained the great Via Fossa and turned north-east. When the road ended at Lindum, they turned due north for Eboracum, and from that destination they rode on toward Cilurnum.

Cilurnum was one of the sixteen stone-work beads strung along the carcanet that was the great Wall of Hadrian. But neither they nor the Wall had been built for ornamentation. They were all business, the business of preserving the order that was Rome from the wildness that was the North. Each fort was a ruthlessly neat square of stone, within and round which men drilled in exacting formation. Its stone rang with the bellows of officers, the answering shouts of their men, the incessant thud of booted feet, the creak of axles, the clash of hammer on anvil, the nickering of horses, and the blasts of trumpets.

In the handful of years since it had gone up, Cilurnum had begun to sprout the makings of a village on its southern slope, the usual sprawl of bothies, temples, markets, and wine-shops. Beyond the bustle of fort and village was a shallow wooded vale through which ran a peaceful river, and there Flavia and Esca made camp on their eleventh night out of Calleva. On the morning of the twelfth day, they presented themselves at the fort’s Praetorian gate, requesting passage to the North.

That passage was thoroughly uneventful. Flavia gave her name as Marcus Flavius Aquila, traveling with his slave, Esca. The soldiers did not, to her surprise, ask her her business beyond the Wall. Bored as they seemed, and thus surprising her with their lack of curiosity, she realised it was not of much interest to them who departed through the northern gate of Cilurnum, only who entered through it. The decurion of the gate-guard did indeed speak at length to a trader who had ridden south, his full-laden wagon chocked and its horses hobbled on the other side of the Wall. But the decurion did not spare a glance at Flavia and Esca as they passed under the dark stone arch into the one-time province of Valentia.

Into the loam-dark hills and bare moors to their north and west they rode, the silence between them broken not even by the ring of shod hooves on stone. Before they’d approached Cilurnum Esca had said, “We must unshoe the horses, _domina_ , once we are through the gate. It will be all turf, no roads, and no blacksmiths to ply their trade.” Nor did there seem to be any other men about them, or women, or children — no creatures other than the roe-deer and the mountain fox, and the curlews whose swooping trills rang through the moorlands as the sun westered and sank.

At some point they stopped upon a hilltop to take stock of their surroundings. Flavia gazed down into the valley to their west — what the tribes called a _glen_ , and what to her eyes was a primordial chasm of mist-crested darkness. There was likely nothing at their bottoms but jagged rocks, yet she could easily imagine them swarming with Areimanius’s minions.

“Which way, do you think?” she asked Esca.

“Your decision, _domina,”_ he said curtly. After a pause he added, his tone not so sharp, “You realise how vast these glens are, do you not?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Five thousand men could disappear into a single glen. And there are thousands of glens. One could search for months, even years, yet find nothing.”

Flavia’s gut tightened. She peered sideways at Esca, wondering if his words concealed a dagger, one that would not have surprised her Uncle Aquila. But his face did not seem hard, nor did his eyes glint. Perhaps her uncle had spoken true, that Esca was nothing like the men she’d led, yet she’d yet wager that her slave had spoken of no more than the poor odds of finding what she sought.

Her hand stole to the little leather bag slung about her neck. Within it was her only memento of her father: a tiny wooden bird. Their farm in Etruria had been plentiful with olive-trees, both cultivated and wild, and one of the latter had grown a gall on its twisted roots in the rough shape of a bird. Flavia, who was seven then, pointed it out to her father. He carefully freed it from the root with his knife, then spent an hour with her on his knee as he deftly carved beak, eyes, wings, and feathers into the little knot of wood.

After Isca, she had locked bird and bag away in bitterness, as they seemed to speak to her: _Now you will never learn the truth of his death._ But as she and Esca had readied for their journey, she’d rediscovered the little carving, and she thought it only meet that she wear it as an amulet as she rode to whatever forsaken place her father had died in.

Now, caressing the solidity of the wood beneath the leather, she bowed her head and closed her eyes. In a voice softer than a whisper she murmured, “Mayest thou keep me in both worlds, _O Mithra_ , lord of wide pastures — and of wide, dark valleys. Guide me safely over these valleys, safe from the fiend Death, from the fiend Areimanius, from the fiendish hordes who lift up the spear of havoc. I go the way as thou hast ordered, as thou hast established the law and ordained the sacrament. I wield the weapons of Mithras and the Light; no darkness may stand against against them.”

When she raised her head again, she saw Esca looking away, a pinkness to his cheeks. It occurred to her he’d never seen her beseech her god before. _Heard_ her, possibly, from her bedroll at night, but never _watched_ her send up her prayers to Mithras. She knew little of the gods that the Britons worshipped, but she wondered which had Esca’s pledge. A god of the forests, who guided his swift spear? A goddess of healing, who bound up the wounds of his heart? A god of war, who’d abandoned him in his time of need? The god who presided over the dead, among whom his loved ones now dwelt?

She let these questions drift from her mind and seized upon the answer Mithras had given her. “We shall,” she said, “ride north.” And she touched her heels to the flanks of her mare.

As Esca caught up with her on his gelding, he said, “We ride into the lands of those with no love for Romans. Whomever we meet, domina, let me speak to them, and hold your peace. If they learn who you are, they will kill you — and me.”

***

All things considered, their surroundings were not the most displeasing ones Flavia had ever seen.

Valentia was, to be sure, a very different world from the gentle swells of Etruria’s hills, tamed and terraced and dotted with fruit-trees. It was not as inhospitable as the fiery-red desolation of the Judaean desert; nor were its elevations as starkly imposing as the peaks of the Alpes, so high they bore crowns of snow the year round. But the hills that erupted from the earth all about Flavia and Esca towered silent and sullen over them like the Titanes of Othrys. Between them yawned the even darker glens, and after Esca’s earlier words she imagined them concealing not the hordes of Darkness but a legion each — five thousand _lemures_ in worm-tattered red wool and rusted armour, the flesh beneath long gone.

But at times they would round the shoulder of a hill and descend into a very different sort of glen, lush and green and narrow, threaded with a bubbling white stream that raced over broad shelves of stone and whose waters tasted the way pure crystal rang. The rowan-trees beyond the shelves had opened their cream-white blossoms to the air, filling the chasm with the musky scent of their nectar. In such glens Flavia and Esca would take their rests, watering the horses and letting them crop the grass, then each drinking from his or her own cupped hands and stretching out on the bank.

Esca had taken to riding without his tunic on the warmer days. He had not asked Flavia’s leave; he had merely flicked his eyes in her direction, to catch her reaction. She did little more than glance at him briefly and turn away. She supposed she should have had a sharp word for him, as his mistress, for his presumption. But she could not see how it mattered, out in this wild land with no-one else about for miles and miles. In truth, she wished she could do the same, ride bare-breasted through the moors like the warrior-women of Britannia were said to have done in battle, were said to still do in some places — but even she was not so unmoored from propriety.

And, she was forced to acknowledge, when Esca rolled over on the grassy bank she could well appreciate the shift of muscles beneath his sun-gilded skin, making sinuous the blue ink on his arms and breast. For all that he was small and sullen and barbarous, he was a beautiful man, as different to the most handsome Romans as these wild hills and glens were to the docile landscape of her childhood.

With something that had become kin to instinct during her years in the Army, she snapped that thought in two like a dry twig and tossed the halves from her mind.

***

She had thought, poring over a map in Uncle Aquila’s study weeks ago, that she and Esca would wind their jagged way north by setting out for the western coast, then for the eastern one, and back again, as hounds follow a scent. One such leg of the journey, surely, would set them across the trail of the Eagle. 

The plan had seemed so simple when four walls closed her in. Riding through the endlessness of the moors, it took on a dreamlike futility. And that on the better days, when they weren’t pelted with icy rain or shrouded in mists, all the layers they wore weighted down with a dampness that never seemed to dry completely.

Flavia’s hopes rose again as they began to encounter other people. Small groups of hunters and travellers, at first. Then villages here and there, if one could give that name to three or four tumbledown roundhouses about which children played in the dirt, naked save for the charms hung round their necks to ward off evil. She hung back, as always, while Esca stepped forward. She would at times catch the word _rómhánach_ in the conversations, but nothing more. Then Esca would clasp arms with whichever man he spoke to, return to her, and shake his head.

After one such encounter with a pair of greybeards, he said to her, “They remember seeing the Legion march north, but they never came back this way.”

“They _must_ know more than that,” Flavia said in frustration. “Ask them again.”

Esca gave her a cold look. “And suggest to them that I do not believe them?”

She tightened her mouth and said nothing in reply. Not then. But at the third such meeting thereafter she lost her temper.

The hunter to whom Esca was talking turned to give her a brief insolent look. Esca, at best, seemed not to register it. When the other man’s back was turned, Flavia slid off her mare, stole up to him, and — as Esca cried out in Latin, “What are you doing?” — seized him by the filthy knot of his braids and put her knife to his throat.

“What you’ve obviously refused to do these last two months,” she spat, not bothering to disguise her voice overmuch. The man’s back heaved against her body as she held him tight between herself and the blade. “Ask him where the damned Legion went.” When Esca froze, she snapped, _“Ask him!”_

Esca stared hard at her. When she returned his glare, he cut his eyes away from her and asked the shaking hunter a question. _Rómhánach_ , Flavia understood, and nothing else. All she understood, or thought she understood, in the man’s answer was the word _three_.

“What does he say?” she demanded.

Staring coldly at her again, Esca repeated the other man’s words in her tongue: “‘Turn east, to the Place of Three Hills. There you will find a hunter who can tell you what you wish to know.’”

 _The Place of Three Hills._ Trinomontium.

She shoved the hunter away from her hard; he stumbled and fell. Her hand felt as though it crawled with lice, but she would give neither him nor Esca the satisfaction of seeing her wipe it on her tunic like a delicate Roman maiden. She turned and marched back to the horses without another word.

***

Before Flavia had been in leading-strings, Trinomontium had thrummed like a hive. It had housed a double cohort in its barracks and numerous horses in the stables. Round the red sandstone walls of the fort had risen the usual smithies and lorimers, baths and wine-shops, bothies housing wives and children, bothies housing camp-followers.

Now, grass poked up from between the street-cobbles, and the timber of the roofs had long since caved in. The wells were clogged and sealed with leaves, and the roots of an elder-tree had forced two walls of the cohort’s shrine apart. As Flavia and Esca approached at sunset, she made out on a fallen stone the shape, in low relief, of a charging boar. The mark of the Twentieth Legion.

They led their mounts through the empty garrison-town. Though the horses remained unshod, their hooves beat out a pattern on the cobbles that rang unnaturally loud in the silence — a silence that unsettled Flavia far more than that of the black hills had done.

She was not sure she should be relieved or alarmed that it seemed to unsettle Esca even more. “I mislike this place intensely,” he muttered.

“Do you fear _lemures?”_ she asked, peering at one building to ascertain whether what remained of its roof would fall upon them in the night. “This was the stronghold of the Twentieth, not the Ninth.”

He turned to her, his face oddly pale even in the dimming light, and said, “Are you certain, _domina,_ that the Ninth never served here _after_ they disappeared into the mists?”

She said nothing for a moment, then asked without scorn, “Shall we shelter out under the hazel-trees instead?”

He tensed his jaw. “If you are not troubled to sleep here, neither shall I be.”

Their camp for the night was the end of a barrack row; she reckoned that if the mass of timber and rotted thatch above them had held for thirty years it would hold for one night more. While Esca gathered fodder for the horses and bracken for bedding, Flavia built a serviceable fire from the rotted timber all about them. Esca returned, and they brought the horses into the barrack, blocking their exit with a mass of thorn-branches. They made a quick, near-silent supper of smoked venison and the ubiquitous Northern barley-cakes before piling the bracken against the wall and spreading it with the sheepskins that were their saddles by day.

Esca lay down and fell into slumber almost at once. Flavia sat a while longer by the fire. Watching his breast rise and fall steadily as the fire flickered on the sandstone and the rain began to drum down on what was left of the roof, she wondered if she would have lain down as meekly as he, had she believed Trinomontium haunted ground. Eventually, she made her own way to her skin-covered pile of bracken and, at length, passed into sleep herself.

In her dreams, she watched a legion at pilum practice. Legionaries who held their spears between fleshless finger-bones, whose helms and chin-straps bracketed death’s-heads out of whose empty eye sockets vermin crawled. And out of whose tongueless mouths issued a jaunty tune, one that Flavia had seemingly known forever:

> A long march, a long march,  
>  And twenty years in store,  
>  When I left my girl at Clusium  
>  Beside the threshing-floor.

_“… domina.”_

She started awake at the soft hiss, her hand reaching under the sheepskin for her knife, before her eyes unfogged and lit upon Esca. He held a finger to his lips, but it was unnecessary, for she could hear the same tune from her dreams being whistled outside the barrack wall. And then the whistler turned husky-voiced singer:

> Oh, when I joined the Eagles,  
>  As it might be yesterday,  
>  I kissed a girl at Clusium  
>  Before I marched away.

Flavia and Esca were already moving quietly, daggers to hand, slipping through an opening in the barrack wall too narrow to admit either horse.

The singer was of middle years, sporting a headful of coarse, shaggy grey hair and a beard to match, but his figure was hard and lean. He wore nothing but a kilt the color of rust. The rest of his body, even his face, was coloured with far more blue than Esca bore: spirals, wings, and interlocking knots. Despite the light-heartedness of the song he sang, his voice was shadowed in melancholy.

> A long march, a long march,  
>  And twenty years behind,  
>  But the girl I kissed at Clusium  
>  Comes easy to my m—

The last word broke off in an indignant squawk as they brought him down, Esca kneeling on his chest with his dagger to his throat while Flavia wrested his spear from his hand. He burst into a tirade of British, and though Flavia knew not a word of it the tone put her in mind of the worst Tiber-side profanities. She looked down upon him and started: the morning light, slanting across his forehead, threw into relief the brand-scar there in the shape of the sun.

“Look under his chin,” Esca said, pulling the man’s head back. It was barely visible among the grey hairs of his beard, but it was there: the gall left by the chin-strap of a Legionary’s helm.

In one swift motion Esca leapt behind the man, grasped his arms, and pulled him to his feet, all while keeping his blade at his throat. “What is your name?” Flavia demanded, pitching her voice low as she had the Legions.

The painted man huffed out a growl of British words. Esca pulled his arms tighter behind his back and snarled an order in the same language, an order containing the word _laidineach._

The fight seemed to go out of their quarry all at once. He set cold dark eyes set on Flavia and said, in flawless if accented Latin, “I am called Guern. My name, _domini,_ is Lucius Gaius Metellus.” He paused, then added, “First Cohort of the Ninth Legion.”

***

Once they had apologised for their uncivil welcome of him and briefly explained their quest, Guern the Hunter was a surprisingly generous and voluble man. Flavia wondered if it were the first opportunity to speak with another Roman in twenty years that had loosened his tongue. Earlier in the morning he’d taken down a half-grown roe-buck and slung it over his pony, which he’d hobbled in the woods beyond the barrack. Now he carved up part of it for their breakfast, tossing the piece with the skin attached to his two brindled hounds. In the shelter, he lay three thick collops of meat in the ashes of the rekindled fire, and he hung what remained of the buck from a splintered tie-beam.

“We could do with more wood,” Flavia remarked to Esca.

“I’ll gather it,” Guern said, and strode out of the shelter.

When he was out of earshot, Esca leaned in close to Flavia and murmured, “Do not trust him completely. He deserted your father’s Legion, after all.”

Flavia whispered back, “We do not know that for sure. In either case, he’s still a Roman.”

“In name and blood, perhaps,” Esca said. “In all other wise?”

Flavia did not reply. 

Some minutes later Guern returned with three short, thick pieces of birch-branch, as well as three thinner sticks whose ends he’d whittled into forks. He laid the former upon the low flames, which hissed and rose up to curl the silver bark from the wood beneath. Then he sat beside the fire, and Esca and Flavia sat on either side of him.

“So,” Guern said, his eyes still on the fire. “A _romana_ who dresses and fights like her father did.”

Flavia’s brows rose. “So you guessed,” she said.

He gave her a measuring look. “Your father had told us he’d no sons, just a small daughter. What was more likely, that so upright a man had lied to us, perhaps because his only son was a eunuch — which somehow seems unlikely for one of his rank? Or that the daughter decided to live as though the gods had simply forgotten to give her a _mentula?”_

Esca’s face hardened. Flavia, who had heard much worse said of her since the first surgeon discovered her secret, simply continued to hold Guern’s gaze without expression. At length he said, “What do you wish to know of me, a poor hunter who has heard little of Rome and not spoken her tongue in twenty years?”

“I wish to know what became of my father’s Legion,” she said flatly. “And of its Eagle.”

Guern sighed. He leaned forward and turned over the collops with one of the forks. “Your father’s Legion was… an ill-omened one, long before he’d ever joined it. Ill-omened since forty years before, when it dispossessed the Queen of the Iceni.”

“Boudicca,” Esca said quietly.

“Aye. Know you the story, _domina?”_

Of course she did. From an old soldier who’d survived his role in that dispossession, in fact, she had heard remarkably gruesome details. But Guern might know elements of the tale that no Roman would. “It has been years since I’ve heard it told; I pray you refresh my memory, Guern the Hunter.”

“Well,” said Guern, “her husband was allied to Rome, or so the Iceni thought. His realm was to be inherited jointly by his own daughters and by the Emperor. Then he died. The Procurator ordered the Ninth to invade, Boudicca was lashed, her daughters were despoiled, and Rome helped itself to the land and gold of the Iceni. For that, she cursed them, Empire and Procurator and Legion all. The Legion most of all: her people hated Rome’s soldiers for having turned so many Britons out of their homes and clapped them into chains. Boudicca’s uprising was a bloody one, but it failed, and she took poison. Her death, it’s said, lent power to her curse.

“The Ninth was returned to full number and strength, but never again did it flourish. Memories are long amongst the tribes here, and if you tell a Spaniard of a curse, before long he will attribute all his misfortunes to it. To find new recruits grew harder, and the standards for them lower, each year. When I joined, from the ranks of the proud Thirtieth, the Ninth was rotted from the inside out.” Guern leaned forward and spat into the fire.

“Its last Legate was a hard and upright man who’d never stood in battle and who hadn’t the humility to listen to his men. Soon after his promotion, Trajan began to draw upon the troops in Britain for his endless campaigns elsewhere; and the fewer of us left here, the fiercer the tribes seethed beneath us. When Trajan died, they rose up, and we had no sooner dealt with the Brigantes and Iceni — with heavy casualties, and with two of our cohorts off in Germania — than we were ordered north to put down the Caledonians. There were four thousand of us, if that. The omens were bad; the sacred fowl wouldn’t touch the grains the Legate threw them. We left the Praetorian Gate convinced we were marching to our doom, and there is no worse way to march off to war.

“The tribesmen came out of the mist that wreathes the mountains in autumn, picking us off as wolves harry the weak deer at the edge of a herd. Before we could return their arrow-fire, they’d vanish into the same mists, and the sorties sent out after them never returned. By the time we reached Trinomontium, more than another thousand of us had died or deserted. We’d no supplies, the fortifications had already begun to crumble, and all the North gathered round our walls and howled like wolves for our blood. We chose a spokesman and begged our Legate to let him approach the Painted People and make the best terms he could, that we could march back south in one piece. He refused, and he called down curses upon us.”

He speared a piece of meat on each fork and passed one to Flavia, one to Esca, before taking the last for himself. “More than half of the remaining men mutinied. I did not, I swear to Mithras — I see you follow him too, _domina_ — and I held back the few men left in my command as well. The Legate eventually saw reason, and he tried to talk the mutineers down with a promise that they’d not be punished, not even the ringleaders, when we returned to Britannia. But not a one believed him.”

“With good reason,” Flavia said grimly through her mouthful of venison. “The Senate would have ordered their decimation.”

“Aye,” Guern said after another swallow of meat. “The Legate was a brave man, I’ll give him that, standing empty-handed before the mob and calling upon them to remember the oath they took. One man struck him down with a spear, Trinomontium turned slaughter-house, and the warriors of the tribes swarmed what remained of the ramparts to join in in the bloodshed. The Brigantes, the Votadini, the Damnonii, the Selgovae, the Novantae, the Venicones, the Taexali — and the most vicious of them all, the Epidaii. The Seal People.”

Guern swallowed again, this time without food in his mouth. “The Seal People are feared throughout the North. They hack the feet off the enemy dead, that their souls can’t walk beyond the sunset. They ripped out the hearts of our officers while they were still alive. We could hear their last screams.”

Esca’s eyes were huge, and the knot in his throat bobbed long after he’d swallowed his mouthful. Flavia’s back was cold and prickling from nape to small, and the flesh on her arms had risen.

“By dawn,” Guern said, “there weren’t a thousand men alive within the walls of this fort. Of the rest, those who hadn’t died went away with the Painted People, willing or no. As the sun rose, your father called the rest of us together before the Praetorium. The tribesmen no longer feared us, so to bargain with them would no longer have been of use. We determined to fight our way out of the death-trap that the fort had become and, if we could, take the Eagle back to Eburacum. At the very least, the Senate would not have every tenth man of us stoned to death.

“We waited ‘til night-fall, when the tribesmen were deep in their cups, and slipped out by the southern scarp. We’d have disappeared into the mists, except that they weren’t as drunk as they’d let us believe. We made our last stand in the darkness, fighting where we stood, pissing where we stood — and dropping where we stood.”

“And my father?” Flavia asked huskily.

Guern lowered his eyes. “I… I do not know, _domina_. I lost sight of him. And when the mists rolled in, I slipped away.”

“You deserted,” Flavia rephrased, her voice hard and vicious.

Guern’s black eyes blazed. “You were not there, _domina_. I know not what battles you’ve fought in, but you have no idea what it was like to stand against the Northern tribesmen. It was the _Clades Variana_ all over again — and, given how many soldiers had defected to the tribes, for all I know they had their own Arminius with them.”

She continued to glare at him, but she said nothing. Eventually, he continued: “I was no longer fit to fight, in any case. I’d a wound I could shove three fingers into, and I was shaking with fever. I followed the stars west as best I could, hiding in the furze when I could no longer stand. A tribesman trod on my hand, but I held my tongue and went undiscovered. When I no longer saw nor heard movement about me, I stood, stripped off all that Rome had clad me in, and tied a rag about my loins. I am of Northern Gaul and can pass well enough for a Pict. And I stumbled on.

“At dawn, I staggered into a village of the Selgovae and fell across the threshold of the first hut. The family within was nothing but kind to me, and when they learned my story they cared not, as many soldiers have deserted to the tribes over the years. Their eldest girl, Muirne, tended my wounds, and she guarded me as a lioness does her cubs.” Guern’s blue-stained face softened. “I lived with them for several years. When Muirne came of age to bear children, I took her to wife. We live as out-dwellers in the forest, with our sons and our wee daughter. It is not life in Rome, it is not even life in Gaul. But it is life, and it is not a bad life, all in all.”

A few moments after Guern had ended his story, Flavia asked quietly, “Will you show me the place where my father last fought?”

Shadows drifted into Guern’s eyes. He nodded and stood, laying his empty fork down. Flavia and Esca followed suit, Esca dousing the flames, and they followed him out the narrow crack in the barrack wall.

It was in the woods just east of the fortress. They stepped over a field of rusted iron and brass, flaking red paint, and bronze gone green: helms, shields, _lorica hamata_. And, everywhere amongst the metal, bone. Moss brimmed between the ribs of skeletons and between the delicate bones of hands and fingers. Across the well-bleached curve of a skull, millipedes wriggled, vanishing into eye-sockets. Flavia thought of her dream, and shuddered.

“What of the Eagle?” she asked, turning to Guern.

“A few nights after I came to safety, others in my new village watched a procession of the Seal People pass by. They bore the Eagle aloft in the front, preceding a cavalcade of torches in the rear.”

Flavia breathed in deeply, and when she spoke again her voice was harder. “And where did they make an end?”

Guern shocked her, then, by breaking into a near-toothless grin. He turned to Esca and said, “Why don’t you tell her at last, _Brigantes?_ You know as well as I do. Your people were here.”


	3. Caledonia

“Why did you not _tell_ me?” she shouted at Esca’s figure, retreating across the moor. “We’ve traipsed about this cursed land for two months, and you _knew!_ You knew _all_ of it!”

Esca said nothing in reply. His silence was a goad, as it had been for the three days since they’d parted company from Guern.

They’d forded the Cluta at a leaning pine, as the painted hunter had instructed them, and followed the right bank of the river to the line that had, once, divided the frontier from the wild North. As they’d crossed moors and ascended hills, passing by the estuaries and bays that the Britons called _firths_ , Flavia had held her tongue. But the exchanges between them grew sharper and shorter, and Esca less and less obliging and less and less deferential. It took nothing more than the ache in her leg, and her insistence that they march on against his that they rest, for the air between them to explode like flour set alight in battle.

“Your tribe was _there!”_ Flavia shouted all the louder. “Along with all the others! They butchered the men of the Ninth — my father’s men — like _dogs!_ No, not even like dogs! What sort of savage tears the beating heart out of a living hound?”

Esca swung round. His face was a hard, stony mask.

“I swore an oath to protect your life,” he said, and his voice was the same as his face. “I have kept that oath by keeping you safe. I did not swear an oath to serve Rome, to salvage its ‘honour’ at the expense of my people’s memory.”

“You are my _slave!”_ she roared. “Your duty is to do my bidding! And, when we are alone, you will call me _‘domina’_ when you speak to me!’”

He stared at her. And then he began to laugh. At first it was just a chuckle, but soon he was throwing his head back, and his laughter was as mocking as his smile had been when she’d threatened a year and a half before to send him back to the arena.

“Oh, _Flavia,”_ he said finally, the throes of mirth subsiding again into chuckles. “You might be as hard and as brave as five men, but you’re a _child_ — and an utter idiot of a child, at that.”

Her field of vision turned red. She strode up to him, her arm drawn back, and did what she had never done as a centurion. The sound of her palm against his cheek rang out in the clearing, and his torso as well as his head spun backward.

He looked stunned for the briefest moment. Then his reddened face split in a predatory grin, and his own open hand exploded across her own cheek before she could duck it. He had held nothing in check, any more than he’d ever done when they sparred, and under the force of the blow she fell to her good knee in the mud.

Before she could catch her breath, he leapt at her and knocked her flat on her back. There he pinned her, hands on her upper arms, the right side of his body a weight on her uninjured left thigh and hip. 

“Let… me… _up,”_ she grated. The last time she’d wanted to kill another person so badly was when her old centurion, a man she’d have willingly died for, died beside her instead in Judaea. She didn’t remember at all wresting his killer’s wretched life from him. The red fog of rage had shrouded her vision so entirely that all she’d ever know of it was what the other men told her in the _taberna_ later as they bought her drink after drink.

Esca glared down at her while continuing to smile like a wolf that had cornered a doe. “No, actually, I don’t think I will. Not for the moment, anyway.”

Fear flowed under the rage now, a chilly wash. He’d promised to guard her life. He hadn’t promised to guard her virtue, such as it was. “So you intend to prove my uncle right? Is this what you intended all along, _sentina?”_

His eyes flamed, and he gave a short bark of laughter. “You flatter yourself. I am the son of a chieftain who is well remembered and still much loved in these lands, and I have been told from time to time that I am not hard to look upon. Before the Romans took me I never wanted for women’s company, and even in slavery I enjoyed it on occasion — and all of it willing, too. You think I can’t find something better to fuck than a limping _virago_ with all the charm of a nettle and as much sense as the gods give hares?”

She wanted to spit in his face. Her mouth was dry. “So what is this, then? You style yourself my master now, and think to put me in my place?”

“Your master? Hardly. You’d be even more useless as a slave than I was. As for putting you ‘in your place’? I will say it thusly: So long as we are north of the Wall, I hold your life in my hands. I am oath-sworn to guard it. I am _not_ oath-sworn to take great pains with your comfort. Do you remember that.”

Something in his face softened, and she felt a jangle of alarm in the pit of her stomach just before he drew the ball of his thumb across her lower lip. She ground her teeth together to keep herself from sinking them into it.

“Do we understand one another, Flavia?” he said, quietly and with less vitriol.

She was debating whether to insult him again when the shadow fell over them both. She looked up and felt herself whiten.

Esca was outlandish enough, wreathed as he was in whorls of blue ink, but the man who now stood above them was of a different order of savagery altogether. His hair had been clipped and shaved into a narrow band that ran from his brow to his nape. His flesh was a chalky blue-grey, which Flavia realised was due to a thick coat of mud on it. And his barbaric garments were hung with all manner of bone-pendants. Several other men stood behind him, all shorn, bedaubed, and clad in the same manner.

The first man spoke, entirely in British. Esca, looking at him now and not Flavia, had slowly risen from her as the strange man spoke. He replied in the same tongue. She understood not a word of it, but it seemed to her that their accents were different: Esca’s softer and more drawling, this man’s with a more guttural edge. In Esca’s reply she caught the word _rómhánach,_ his name, and what sounded like his father’s: _Cunovalos._

She sat up on her elbows, then pulled herself into a sitting position. Immediately, Esca surprised her by stooping and offering her his arm. Keeping her face carefully blank, she accepted it, and she rose to stand by his side.

The strange man inclined his head and said to her, _“Mo bhean.”_ She had no idea what it meant, but she inclined her head as well.

Esca said something to him. The man laughed and asked a question in an incredulous voice. Esca responded at length, his tone neutral but authoritative. The man seemed to accept what he’d just been told, and then he asked another question, rather more mildly. Esca nodded and made a reply. Then all of them smiled, and Esca clasped arms with each of the strange Britons. 

When this was done, they turned on their heels, and Esca followed, pulling Flavia along with him.

“What — where are we going?” she hissed.

“To their camp,” he said.

“What did you tell them? About me, who I was, what you do here with me?”

He took a deep breath and eyed her carefully.

“About myself, I told him the truth, that I am the son of Cunoval. As for you, I told him you were my wife, and he called you _‘domina’_ in their tongue—”

“‘Their’ tongue? Not your own?” she cut in sharply.

“Not my own, no, though I speak that of the Epidaii well enough; there is a slight kinship between the languages, and the Brigantes traded with them regularly. I told him you didn’t speak their tongue, nor any British tongue for that matter, and he wondered why this was so. I said you were my former master’s daughter, from far south of the Wall, and you’d run off with me for love rather than be married to a lecherous old magistrate. You’re dressed in men’s clothes so that you can journey more easily and that the Roman authorities will be less likely to spot you. We were handfast by an old druid we found within a day’s ride of the Wall, and now we seek out any other survivors of my clan; failing that, others of my tribe. And, before I said all that, I had told him they had stumbled upon us at … shall we say, a tender moment.”

Her jaw dropped.

He grinned. “Would you have preferred I tell them you were my slave?”

“Almost,” she snarled.

His fingers sank hard into her forearm. “Don’t be stupid, if that’s even possible for you. Slaves stumble behind the wagons of the Seal People with their hands bound to the rear axle. You’ll ride beside me instead, and your leg won’t be taxed. And they’ll treat you with respect. Trust me, you _want_ them to.”

***

Treat her with respect they did, but in some ways felt she she might as well have been back in Calleva.

In the daytime, Esca kept company with the man to whom they had first spoken — Liathan, Prince of the Seal People, and his men. They sparred on the sands, or they hunted in the woods a few leagues away. Flavia remained in the company of the Seal women, wearing gown and slippers made of sealskin.

The women and girls seemed to spend most of their time with bone needles in their rough chapped hands, passing them through thick oily sealskin as deftly as if it were cloth from Serica. All the while they jested, gossiped, sang strangely lilting songs, minded their smallest babes, and taught their daughters to sew. Flavia, who’d had enough trouble as a girl getting linen or wool to hang together, was relieved that none of them ever offered her needle and thread.

But, though she had no ability for women’s work, neither did she wish to sit idly by them. She had no idea how long Esca planned for them to remain, and she did not wish to be a burden. Even more, she needed to be busy to keep her fears from preying on her mind.

She was no cook, as she had said to Uncle Aquila, but then again no Roman banquets were being prepared here. She had attended enough pots over cookfires when she was in the Army. Now she sat by the Seal People’s cookfires, keeping the company of two young women named Sadhbh and Emer, and she stirred and seasoned endless cauldrons of stew — stirred and seasoned them well enough, if the clanspeople’s appetites for what she produced were any measure. Fish stew, seal stew, oyster stew, mussel stew. The hares, birds, and other creatures that the men successfully hunted were mostly roasted and eaten in the woods, and what little was brought back went straight to the smokehouse.

The fruits of the sea were reckoned great delicacies by Romans. After a week, Flavia thought she’d be happy never to taste them again.

At night, she sat with Esca in the great tent that housed the Chieftain, Dergdian, and his family, as well as his closest men and their own kin. Esca kept his arm draped protectively about her shoulders as he spoke with their hosts, mostly with the men, though sometimes addressing another woman with a courteous word and a polite smile. Once in a while the Prince’s seven-year-old son Caílte, who had taken a great liking to Esca, approached them; Esca would grin and ruffle his hair while speaking fondly to him.

Flavia forced her body not to stiffen, forced herself to smile as well, through all the exchanges. Both efforts were helped by the drink the clan brewed from wild honey.

“It’s strong,” Esca had said quietly in Latin at her ear the first night. She’d shrugged and tossed down half the cup in one gulp, earning raised brows and smiles of surprised admiration from the men round them as the inside of the tent began to take on a pleasant haze. Esca had kept his own smile firmly in place, but he arched a brow at her, too, and it did not seem to be an admiring gesture.

And then it would be time to douse the seal-oil lanterns and sleep. That was, possibly, the worst moment of every day. It was one thing to be uncomfortably aware of the solid warmth of Esca against her side as they sat together. It was quite another to have him lying full against her back beneath a rug, arm braced about her, as the sounds of enthusiastic copulation rose from other pallets into the stifling air round them. Sometimes she felt a hard shape press into her hip or buttock, followed by quick and restless shifting on Esca’s part. She would close her eyes tightly and give thanks to Mithras — did he even hear her prayers anymore, now that she did not live as a man? — that she could sleep in any situation.

It could have been worse, she knew. He could have indeed told them she was his slave. And, had he not told them outright that she was a woman, they would have discovered it before long: There was nowhere she could have hidden that fact, either in a tent full of people or on a desolate shore.

But, oh, Father of Light, she was lonely, lonelier than she had been out on the moors with only a sullen slave at her side. She had never been good at learning new tongues, and she could pick up only a word or two here and there. The only other soul who spoke Latin among them was Esca, she only ever saw him at night, and, though he sat close by her, his attention was entirely with the Seal men and his words entirely in their tongue. As she sat and smiled, her fingers worried at the little olive-wood bird through the leather of its pouch, and she whispered prayers to Mithras without speaking his name.

About a week and a half after they had come, Esca approached her at the cookfire. It was evening, one of the seemingly endless ones that marked the onset of summer in the North. The men had had great success at hunting: In addition to a variety of small game, they had taken down a stag, which they had brought back in its entirety. Some of the meat had gone to the smokehouse; the rest of it, Flavia, Sadhbh, and Emer now roasted over the fire.

“Come with me,” he said quietly, adding a hand-gesture for the benefit of Emer and Sadhbh. They stole looks at him, admiring looks. Flavia passed the ladle to Emer, rose, and followed him across the sand.

When they stood by a tall sea-boulder some paces away, he said quietly, “Dergdian has asked me why I do not... take you, when I have told them you are my wife.”

Flavia was silent for a moment. The moment wasn’t silent for her, however; it was filled with the pounding of her blood in her ears. Finally, she demanded indignantly, “What concern is it of his?”

“There is… not much modesty, not many secrets, in a tent or roundhouse full of couples.” His words were uncharacteristically hesitant. “And it seems strange to them that….” He trailed off there, then began again. “I wonder if they have begun to doubt the tale I told them.”

“What did you say to Dergdian in reply?”

“I told him, at first, that you had your courses. When that lie was no longer tenable, I said that as a modest Roman woman you were loath to be bedded where everyone could see and hear. He laughed, and he said that you had left Rome behind for Caledonia, and thus it is fitting that you learn to act as a British, not a Roman, wife.”

She gnawed at her lip for a moment, staring at the sand, before saying, “If it must be done… so be it.”

His eyes widened. “I can’t, Flavia.”

She laughed bitterly. “Why not? I am a woman who lived among men, rough men, as a man. Do you think I have any virtue left? Do you think any man would still want me, not as a whore but as a decent wife — and me a cripple, into the bargain?”

There was, she could have sworn, a pained look in his eyes for the split-second before they narrowed. “Do you think I care about Roman _mores?_ I care whether I get you with child.”

When she looked stupefied, he added, “You do bleed. Perhaps men who thought you were a man never noticed, but I paid attention while we were crossing Valentia and Caledonia. You burned bundles of rags now and again, or buried them in the woods deeply enough that animals wouldn’t unearth them. So, presumably, you are fertile. Why I need explain this to you, I know not, but…” He shook his head and stared at the ground.

Flavia flushed a dull red. It was galling enough for Roman men to look upon her as an unwomanly freak. It was worse from a Briton. From her slave… and that’s what he was, her slave, no matter what lies he’d told the Seal People.

“I thank you for the lesson, _magister,_ but yes, I am quite aware that bleeding signifies fertility in women. What puzzles me is why this worries you. I am still young, I am strong, and having children seems to be what wives are expected to do. So” — she shrugged — “I will have a child.”

“For the love of all the gods!” Esca’s voice rose slightly, but he checked it quickly when a few heads turned in their direction. The heads turned away again, just as fast. A man arguing with his wife, and in a language they didn’t understand at that. Nothing of interest.

“Flavia,” he said, more quietly but urgently. “I do not know how long we must remain here before we can retrieve the Eagle. If you conceive, the longer we wait, the more danger you would be in, and the babe as well. You would need more food, more rest, and in flight there would be little of either. You certainly would not be able to fight as you are used to. And if we flee when you are close to your time? You could _die,_ and the babe too. I swore an oath to guard your life, but I am no midwife; how could I save either of you? And if we returned to Roman territory, you with a babe in your arms, I could be crucified for violating a Roman woman.”

“I would never lie so!” she hissed.

“You needn’t be the one to,” he snapped back. “Any Roman man could accuse me. Not just your uncle; _any_ man. You are a woman; do you think your word will mean anything against his? That preening tribune who sat at your uncle’s table serves at Eburacum; do you not think he, for one, would hesitate to levy such an accusation?”

She stood there quietly again. Her breath had quickened in anger; now it slowed again as she contemplated his words.

“Flavia,” Esca said, a strange look in his eye. “Have you…”

When he didn’t finish the question, she replied, “Have I what?”

“Been taken by a man before,” he said bluntly.

“No. I have not.”

“No one discovered you before you were injured at Isca? No man tried… even if he thought you were Marcus Flavius and not Flavia Aquila?”

“One man did,” she said sharply. “He didn’t discover me… and I made sure he wouldn’t try again.”

There was a brief flash of admiration on his face before the strange expression returned, and this time it was stranger.

“Are you… do you prefer the company of men?”

She blinked. “Well, of course I do. Why would I have dressed as one and gone to war, if I didn’t?”

Esca’s eyes closed. She would have sworn he was praying to his gods to give him strength. When he opened them again, he said, every syllable a piece of iron blade, “Flavia. _Do you prefer other women, not men, in your bed?”_

She stared at him. She had heard men speak of women who serviced one another with cocks made of wood or leather, but she had always assumed they were whores playing to an audience. In any case, what was there to “prefer”? You were born a Roman girl-child, and when you became a woman you were given to a man, and he would take you, and unless perhaps he were very kind, what you wanted had little to do with it. Maybe British women had more choices, but some of the Seal women seemed unhappy with their own men, while others appeared quite content — the same as Roman women.

“You have no idea what I speak of, do you?” he said. The bits of blade in his voice had dulled entirely.

She remained quiet. She felt very stupid. Finally she said, “I… have never considered the idea,” which was no more than the truth.

It was Esca’s turn to say nothing, for his face to turn as inscrutable as it had been in Calleva. She refused to drop her gaze from his. She might be in waters far over her head, both among the Seal People and in this conversation, but if she had learned anything as a soldier it was to pretend otherwise.

“When you were in the Army,” he began again, “did you see men—” He closed his eyes again and, this time, threw up his hands. “Oh, Lugh curse you, I’ll be blunt. Did you see men fuck other men? Use each other’s bodies for pleasure?”

The blood slammed into her face with enough force to rock her on her feet. “I… heard them.” She bit her lip. “Fucking. Or I saw them do so in the dark.”

”Presumably you’d heard from men’s conversations, or maybe read, enough to know how it was done?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d spoken the crude words thousands of times in the Army, but now she had to force them out. “One man’s cock, another man’s arse or mouth or thighs. I don’t know the … finer details, but that’s about the sum of it, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Why do you wish to know?”

He took a deep breath. “Because we must convince the Chieftain that I am fucking you. Be there a rug thrown over us, I can … use your thighs, without the others knowing that I didn’t enter you.”

This time it was not only her cheeks that burned. Unbidden, an image came to her of herself, naked under a warm rug, the hard and sun-gilded muscles of Esca’s shoulders and back under her grasping hands and digging nails as he thrust again and again between her clenched thighs. She wondered what his face would look like, what sounds he would make, when he spent.

She blinked the image away. Let him think she was merely abashed. Even if she had no virtue left to be abashed with.

“All right,” she said. “Tonight, you will let me know when to undress, and … what to do, and I will do it. And we will assuage their suspicions.”

He held her gaze again. There was a flush on his cheeks, and his light-coloured eyes seemed darker than usual, especially with the bright blaze of sunset on the water all about them. But he finally said, “I will.” And he turned about and left her standing on the sand, gathering her mantle about her and watching him walk lithely, gracefully, back to Dergdian’s tent.

***

She drank twice as much mead that night as she usually did. She was getting her head for drinking back anyway. Or so she hoped.

“If you can’t hold your mead and you puke on me I will send you to the slaves’ tent to sleep,” he hissed in her ear. “Or maybe I’ll go there instead and let you lie in your own filth.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said with asperity. “I was once able to outdrink nearly any man in my century.”

“‘Was once able to’ is not the same as ‘can,’ and especially not in matters of drink.”

Cup halfway to her lips, she shot him a hard look and said, “I’d rather not be sober for this.” She took a vicious delight in seeing him flinch, then raise his own cup and drain it in nearly one swallow.

And she wasn’t sober, not for much longer. The inside of the tent took on its usual soft lovely glow. The Seal lords and ladies smiled at her. She smiled back. Her face felt warm, her body felt warm. Esca’s breath on the side of her face, laced with honey, felt warm. The spot where his fingertips softly stroked her, at the base of her neck above the hollow of her collarbone, felt warm—

Conversation about them began to die down. Voices softened to whispers, interspersed with giggles and sighs. There was the rustle of sealskin being shed, the soft wet sounds of mouths. The slide of skin against skin. Rhythmic noises. A soft moan.

Flavia darted a glance at Esca. His colour was high, as high as she knew her own to be. He looked at her, full on. And then he nodded, once, slightly.

She rose, and he rose as well. Their pallet was not many steps away, close to the fire. A place of honour.

She took one deep breath as she stood by it. Then she began to undo the small bone hooks of her gown. Esca watched her. She didn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t know what she’d see in them. Whether she’d want to see it.

The gown was unhooked to her thighs, exposing the undergarment beneath and her breasts rising from the top of it, when she froze. She could not move, could not have moved just then if she’d been prodded with a spear.

If she could have laughed, she would have. She’d all but laid her life down for Rome so many times, been punched and kicked and stabbed and even burnt, nearly shit herself to death with dysentery, had a chariot land atop her, and come out of all of it alive — and, after all of it, this was what would turn her into a fleeing doe?

She felt a hand cover hers. She looked up.

“All is well, Flavia,” Esca said quietly, softer than a whisper. “There is no shame in this, nor pain. I ask you to trust me.”

Her mouth worked. She started to shake. Esca gripped her hand harder, steadying it. She forced herself to breathe. In, out, in, out, until her lungs nearly burst.

And then she was able to undo the remaining hooks and let the gown slide off her shoulders and pool round her feet.

He leaned forward. His fingers touched the hem of the undergarment. He looked up at her, a question in his eyes. She gave one curt nod and looked away.

He took hold of the hem and began to raise the undergarment on her. When it reached her shoulders, she lifted her arms obediently, letting him clear it of her head. Letting him bare her. The light left in the tent was a forgiving one, and she tried not to think about the scars that stippled and striped her torso, the ugly, knotted red mass where the chariot-spikes had taken great gouts of flesh from her thigh.

She continued to look at a spot on the ground, somewhere. She felt, absently, his fingers stroking her cheek, her neck. He was being so kind to her. She wished he wouldn’t be. This was harder to take.

“Flavia?”

She looked up at him, and she saw immediately he acted out of more than kindness.

“You are lovely,” he said. His voice was still kidskin-soft, but there was something rough and urgent beneath the soft surface. Her first impulse was to tell him he didn’t have to lie. But she knew he wasn’t lying. Or, at least, he believed what he said.

She closed her eyes.

He stepped closer to her, lifted her chin, brushed his lips against hers repeatedly, more and more insistently. She let her own lips part, and she felt the warm, wet touch of his tongue to hers. It was a strange sensation in and of itself, and startlingly intimate. Something hot and sharp twisted in her belly.

He withdrew slightly, and he whispered, “Are you not going to kiss me in turn?”

She hesitated for only a second. Then she pressed her mouth back against his, moving her lips against his as he’d done before, feeling them part, slipping her tongue past them.

He pulled her tightly against him. It drove the breath out of her, and she couldn’t take another one for a long moment, not with their tongues curled round one another like the swirls of ink on him, the solid heat of his body hard against hers, the rigid shape pressing not into her arse or hip now but right, right, _right_ in the spot that felt so good, and without thinking she pressed back—

He made a small noise that was stifled against her mouth, and he pulled at her, and suddenly they were tumbling down to the pallet, and he was half-covering her and his mouth was wet against her neck and his hands were everywhere, _everywhere_ on her. The mead had made her languid and loose, but she arched upward and groaned when he took a nipple between his fingertips, when the same fingertips skimmed her thighs and dabbled in the wetness of her cunt, when he turned her on her side a bit and grazed his nails lightly up her back— her back, of all things, she’d had no idea there were that many nerves in it, let alone nerves that gave pleasure.

He stood, and she watched him shed his clothing before he dropped again to hover over her. He was taut, lithe, golden in the subsiding firelight. She reached a tentative hand upward, then pulled it back in flustered, inebriated uncertainty. With a breath hissed out between his teeth he seized her hand again and placed it flat against his breast. She slid it over the broad hard muscles, over the strange blue marks. When her fingertips passed over one pale nipple, she felt him shudder slightly, watched him swallow and the roundness in his throat bob.

“You are… very lovely too,” she said. She had no idea if she’d spoken lucidly or not. When he flushed, a deeper red than she’d ever seen him turn before, she realised she had.

“You… can move your hand lower, if you like,” he breathed.

Without thinking, she looked down. 

“Oh,” she said. _“Oh.”_

“Flavia,” he said, still quietly but his voice beginning to crack with strain. “Please.”

She reached out once more. His back was turned to the fire, but she could see the outline of his cock, fully swollen, standing nearly parallel to his belly. She heard his breath hitch as her fingertips made contact with the head.

In her life she had seen more cocks, perhaps, than any other woman who wasn’t a whore. She’d even touched one or two, helping a wounded man pass water on the battlefield. But she had never touched one in this manner, with a slow, deliberate admiration, hoping her touch would bring pleasure to the man behind it.

It was hard, but it was soft, too, the broad round head like velvet under her fingertips and with a give to it. She stroked it lightly all over, listening to how Esca’s breath quickened or how, once, he gasped. Imitating men she had happened to see pleasuring themselves, she curled her hand into a half-fist and slid it down the shaft — all hardness here, hardness and veins under delicate skin, fitting into her palm as well as the heft of his father’s dagger. And then she moved her hand lower still, until she was cupping his stones, heavy and tight and warm under a thatch of wiry hair. She watched his face through the haze of drink, watched him bite his lip, watched his eyes close and his lips part.

“Flavia —” His voice was thick, and he had to start again before he could finish the sentence. “I would give you pleasure, before I take it of you.”

“You already have,” she said in confusion.

A soft laugh. “Not as much as I could.” He dropped to lie full beside her, and then he slid down against her, his arm bracing her. She watched, drunkenly, as her left nipple disappeared between his lips and his free hand between her legs.

And then her body was jerking, twisting, jolting against his. His fingers had found her _landica_ , and they were chafing it, gently and delicately. She ground herself against his hand shamelessly, realising she was flowing over it and not caring. He was sucking hard on her nipples, and then scraping the very tips against the flat ends of his front teeth—

She let out a throaty cry as she spasmed once, hard, throughout all of her body, and clenching tight round the finger he had slipped halfway inside her. When stars had ceased to explode in her belly and breast, she lay there, shuddering, slick with sweat.

She felt him, hot and damp and solid, press against her once more, and the added warmth of the rug he’d pulled over the both of them. His cock was iron hard against her thighs. She opened them for him, let him settle himself between them, and pressed them tightly round him. He made a sound, a moan that seemed to trail off into a whimper, and then he began to thrust.

She smoothed her hands over his shoulders and arms. She was no longer afire, but she ached with an odd tenderness, and she wanted to touch as much of him as she could. His breaths came short and harsh as his hips worked back and forth; she could feel the muscles in his belly tremble against hers, and his heart pound under her palms when she slid them again down his breast. And then he groaned, his body twitched sharply, and against her inner thighs there was a pulsing sensation followed by a warm, wet flow.

All the tension drained out of him immediately. He remained trembling above her for a moment, hands braced against the pallet on either side of her, panting, heart still racing. Then he dropped once more to her side, and he pulled her to him, hard, as if he feared she would flee. He smelt of mead and clean sweat and a sort of musk.

“Was—” she began, then fell silent. What did she mean to ask, after all?

His arms tightened round her. She felt his lips at her ear.

“It was,” he said.

***

She was, possibly, the first in the tent to awaken. Her head felt like Vulcan’s anvil, and the idea of breaking her fast made her stomach heave.

Esca, in sleep, had loosed his grip on her and now lay on his side facing away from her. With a prayer of thanks for that, she rose, threw the rug about her naked form, stumbled out into the chill pre-dawn, and got several paces away from the tent before splattering the contents of her belly onto the sand. After four or five bouts of retching that made her feel as though she would cough up her bowels, she wiped her mouth on the rug and went back inside. Esca did not stir as she lay back down beside him. 

When she awoke again, the morning light was filtering through the skins of the tent, and she was the only one in it. Her stomach fluttered again as she rose, and her head still felt as though it had been packed with wool, but she could stand and walk and work through it all, she thought. The sun hitting her full in the eyes outside the tent made her rethink that for a moment, but she forced herself once again to breathe deeply until the nausea was under control.

When she reached the cookfire, Sadhbh and Emer looked up, and their faces split into smug, conspiratorial grins. _“A Bhean_ Flavia!” Emer said brightly, too brightly. Flavia repressed a groan. The whole point of the exercise, she knew, had been to produce this result, but that didn’t mean she had to relish it.

As she took her place beside the fire, Emer handed her the ladle and asked her a question. The words were, of course, lost on her, but the girl’s tone was clear enough. As if it had not been, Sadhbh raised her right fore-finger and her loose left fist, and repeatedly she united them in an obscene gesture that would have been understood the whole world over. Both of them laughed riotously.

Flavia smiled weakly and nodded. She was glad, suddenly, that they would be unable to badger her for details. Before long they lost interest in the subject and began to speak between themselves, as usual, only addressing her by her name and with gestures when necessary.

The day dragged on, as it always did, made worse by the constant low throb inside her skull — which heightened during the noon hour — and how the cooking smells caught at her stomach. The three of them usually took bites as they worked; Flavia shook her head when offered, and Emer’s and Sadhbh’s expressions were sympathetic.

The sky was still quite bright when the evening hour came upon them. Flavia’s drink-sickness had abated with time and fresh water. She stood, and she walked toward Dergdian’s tent. 

As she entered, heads turned in her direction. The polite neutral smiles of the last week and a half had been supplanted by broad grins, both sly and approving. Her face began to heat, but she forced herself to smile back.

And then her smile froze as Esca, in the seat of honour as usual, raised his head and took her in. A flush rose on his cheekbones, and, she thought, there was a softness in his eyes that she had not seen before.

She took her seat by his side. His arm went round her waist, as usual. Every inch of her in contact with him burned.

One of the high-born women pressed a cup into her hands. _“Mo bhean?”_

Flavia smiled and inclined her head as she took it, and then turned round again to lock eyes with Esca. She took but a modest sip before passing it to him. His colour heightened, and he took as measured a sip as she had.

After the night before, the moderate amounts were not nearly enough to addle her wits. But it was potent drink, and its warmth throbbed throughout her body, pooling between her legs. She’d nothing to do but float in the intoxicating warmth, and it occurred to her that she was not dreading the moment when all of them would retire to their pallets.

Not at all.

And, just then, Esca leaned forward to listen more carefully to words that another man was speaking, and casually he rested his hand on her thigh. She did not think that others in the tent had seen her shudder. She was under no illusion at all that he had not felt it.

When the conversation began to die, she felt two fingertips slide down the back of her hand. As a damp heat exploded in her belly, she curled her own fingers round his with a decisive pressure. She heard a soft intake of breath, and she rose, still clutching his fingers, even before she saw his nod. He took the cue and rose to his own feet, and in the dim light she thought she saw a smile playing about his lips.

***

There were six such nights.

The seventh day, the encampment began to bustle with an energy that, it became obvious to Flavia, was that of preparation for some sort of feast. New tents rose all along the shore. More food than usual was brought to the cookfire, and she, Emer, and Sadhbh hustled to roast and seethe and season it all.

Throughout the day, men accompanied by young adolescent boys began to arrive on small native ponies, rough-coated but curried to fineness, their bridles set with coral studs and gleaming with silver and bronze. The men and boys themselves were brightly clad, in purple or saffron or scarlet, with fibulae of red-toned Hibernian gold at their shoulders. Merchants, too, swarmed in, along with fortune-tellers, harpers, and horse-traders. If the scene were not quite as sophisticated as the Markets of Trajan, it was as gay as any festival-market Flavia had ever seen before.

In the early evening, Esca sought her out at the cookfire, then drew her aside to the boulder.

“The next few nights are the Feast of the New Spears, when the oldest boys of the Seal People and the other clans of these lands will be made warriors,” he said quietly. “Dergdian’s tent is reserved for men alone, as well as the initiates, and the Dance of the New Spears itself will be held on the shore just outside. The women lament for the sons they are losing to manhood, but they do not participate otherwise, and they sleep with the children in their own tent, pitched a ways away. You shall sleep there, too.”

She blinked, trying to conceal a certain disappointment. She thought she saw it in his face as well.

The pallets in the women’s tent were simpler, and the atmosphere less formal, more akin to when they gathered to sew in the sunlight. Flavia claimed a pallet alongside Emer, who said something to her as she lay down. By now, Flavia had picked up a small bit of the Seal People’s tongue, and between her limited vocabulary and the girl’s tone and expression she gathered that Emer was expressing a mischievous sort of sympathy for her. She smiled, this time with more feeling than when Sadhbh had jabbed her fore-finger into her fist. Emer clapped her on the shoulder and made another comment of evident salacious approval. And then they were each pulling the rugs up round them, and all about them women’s conversations and children’s shrieks began to subside into murmurs and tired whines.

Flavia had not drunk any mead this evening with her supper, but on her pallet she felt a mellow sort of pleasure all the same. Though she could not imagine remaining here forever, she realised how much she liked the Seal women on the whole, what she could deduce of them through the language barrier. Some were shyer than others, of course, and some bolder; but all of them seemed to meet their rough lives with a defiant cheer and a bluntness of speech that reminded her of soldiers. And they were all as competent as any good Legionary, though with needles and cookfires and herb-simples instead of _gladii_ and hammers and nails.

Part of her mind wondered, after all, if perhaps it would not be so bad to remain here with Esca if the Eagle were never found…

She slept well and sound, for all that her body stirred in sleep for want of his company. She rose with a feeling of well-being, and after her morning ablutions she began a day of seemingly ceaseless labour at the cookfire. By now she knew the melodies of the songs Sadhbh and Emer sang as they turned meat-spits and worked ladles; and though she could not sing the words along with them, she could hum. It earned her smiles of surprised pleasure from both girls, and the work seemed to go by faster, just as marches did when soldiers sang of shores they’d visited and girls they’d loved.

The second night found the women’s tent mostly empty; none remained therein but children, a handful of maidens tasked with minding them, and Flavia. Most of the women were outside, raising the lament, as Esca had said, for sons who were departing the world of their mothers for that of their fathers. They rocked back and forth as they crouched on their heels, their wails rising and falling in the primal cadence of mourning. Though the scale was different, and the timbres and of course the pitch, Flavia thought, eerily, of the times she had passed by the temples of Judaea and caught snatches of sound from within.

The death-chant seemed to penetrate into her brain, rippling through her blood, and the effect was that of strong drink. She was not alone in this, she understood, for all the children had fallen silent and still despite being wide awake, and the young girls who tended them as well. She let herself float on the river of human sound more primal than song until—

_Taut muscles under her hands. Pectoral muscles, rippling to her touch, the blue swirls spiraling ever inward upon themselves. A hand between her thighs, a stream of desire running over it. Rough, hot breath against her neck. Her name, spoken in awe, as if she were the mystery and not another acolyte. Tough, scarred flesh that did not give under the dig of her nails. And then a splitting pressure, teetering on the edge of pleasurable and painful—_

“Flavia!”

This time the uttering of her name was a hissed whisper, urgent but without desire. The dream slowed, then began to dissipate as a hand on her shoulder shook her awake and another one clapped over her mouth.

She blinked in confusion. The whisper seemed to have been that of a man, but the figure standing over her wore a woman’s gown and a shawl over its head. The hand over her mouth fell away, and as her vision sharpened she whispered, incredulously, “Esca?”

“Get you up — _quietly._ They’re all asleep on the shore. I know where the Eagle is. If we’re to take it, we’ve got to do it now.”

She pushed herself upward on the pallet, then got to her feet, moving silently. No unearthly laments echoed from outside; all the women and children slept soundly throughout the tent. It was no odd thing to get up long before dawn for a piss, but better that nobody saw her and Esca at all. Flavia saw him gather something up as he followed her, a bundle he must have brought into the tent with him.

It was August by Roman reckoning, and the outside air, scented with salt and bog myrtle, was mild against their skins. He took her hand and led her behind a boulder. Then he shoved the bundle into her hands.

“What—”

“Men’s clothing and a sword. Quickly!” He was already shedding the gown and shawl. Underneath he wore dark tunic and braccae of wool, not sealskin, as well as his old boots.

The bundle contained similar garb and the boots Flavia herself had worn North; the sword was belted. She changed and fastened the belt about her with the speed she had learned in the Legions, and they left her women’s clothing on the ground next to the stone.

They turned into the darkness, away from the shore, the fires, and the men who dozed beside them. Before long they were climbing a steep, rugged hill. The moon was long gone from the sky; the night was tomb-still and sullen with the threat of thunder.

They descended into a glen and crossed it in what seemed utter blackness. Then there was another formidable climb. As they seemed to reach a new summit, Esca stopped her with a hand on her forearm and said, barely audibly, “Look.”

She thought she could make out faint, faint gleams in the inky darkness. She stood and stared until the scene began to resolve itself before her.

They stood on the brim of a wide glen. Below them, at the glen’s centre, was a ring of great standing-stones, encircling what appeared to be a massive turf barrow rising above them. Between stones and mound was a sort of paved forecourt. Flavia saw, set into the mound, a doorway with granite uprights and lintel. It appeared to be covered.

“I brought us this way that we walk on turf, which will make no sound beneath our feet and will not betray us with our tracks,” Esca whispered. “The mound is choked with thorn-trees and undergrowth. There’s a sealskin apron over the doorway, embossed with discs of bronze. We must have a care not to ring them as we move it aside.”

Flavia nodded. They stood a while longer, listening, but — other than the sound of her own heart in her ears — the silence was as utter as that of the Judaean desert on the hottest afternoons.

And then they moved downward and forward.

They walked as delicately as they could over the paving-stones. Their soft, soft foot-falls sounded like clashing cymbals in the silence, Flavia thought, but it could not be helped. When they reached the doorway, Flavia felt for the edge of the skin curtain, whispered, “In the Name of Light,” and gently, ever so gently, pulled it away from the lintels — then cursed to herself as the discs made the softest possible chimes. _Can’t be helped,_ she told herself again as she, then Esca, slipped into the holy place of the Seal People.

The blackness in which they had climbed was as nothing compared with that which surrounded them now. And this blackness vibrated with an alien holiness, one in which, Flavia knew in her marrow, she was unwelcome — as woman, as Roman. As thief. There rose up in her a horrid panic, the same as she had felt for the instant when the brand of Mithras was put to her forehead and she had wondered whether the god would reveal her sex to the men who initiated her. Had he done so, they would have been oath-bound to kill her.

She swallowed, forcing the terror down, as she heard a rustle next to her and the distinct strike of steel on flint. A tiny flame blazed, and Esca touched it to the wick of a little clay lamp until it caught. The light revealed great slabs of stone that walled, floored, and roofed the narrow passage they appeared to be in, but could not pick out an end to the passage.

Flavia held out her hand, and Esca passed the lamp to her. She raised it high and led the way, as they could not walk abreast in the tight corridor.

After about a hundred paces, the stone bounds of the passage fell back and away. They were at the entrance of a great chamber, and before them was a raised flagstone on which sat a shallow cup. Gorgeously wrought of amber, the cup brimmed with a dark-red fluid. Sternly telling herself that it was like to be the blood of a stag or a cock, Flavia continued forward into the shadows beyond, lamp held high.

The chamber was large and circular, and its walls ran higher than the flame could illuminate, but just where they disappeared into darkness she perceived that they began to arch. In the precise centre of the floor lay a foot-wide ring of, she thought, white jadite, and an axe-head made of the same, one corner of its blade just slightly overlapping the ring.

At either side of the chamber was an empty niche. In the far wall there was a third niche, and within it was a darker shape against the shadows.

“Do _not_ touch the stones, do _not_ touch the axe-head, do not even _enter_ that ring,” Esca hissed in her ear, and she heard in his voice something she had never heard in it before, not even in the eerie ruins of Trinomontium: mortal terror. She knew why, and she gave one grim nod.

For all that speed was their ally, they walked slowly, ever so slowly, about the jadite ring, not just in caution not to disturb it but, she thought, lest their haste awaken the anger of whatever dwelt in that chamber. Eventually they gained the niche at the rear — but, even before, the golden glints within had resolved themselves into a shape that left Flavia’s mouth dry and her flesh prickling from the crown of her head to the dip of her spine.

“Take the lamp,” she whispered.

When Esca had relieved her of it, she bent forward and lifted the Eagle in both her hands, as reverently as any priestess. It occurred to her that hers were the last Roman hands to have touched it since her father’s, more than fifteen years gone by, and the metal beneath them fairly thrummed with that knowledge.

“Flavia,” Esca hissed. “There is no time. We must take it and run.”

A deeper voice came from the entrance to the chamber, and Flavia heard what she thought were the words “You will run nowhere.”

When she turned and saw Dergdian the Seal Chieftain, she felt the barest flicker of relief that the words had been spoken by a mortal man.

Gently she set the Eagle back into his niche as he strode toward her and Esca, followed by three other warriors. His eyes gleamed with loathing as he reached them — then grabbed her chin and pulled it upward. Not to cut her throat, but that her face was completely illuminated. And then he spoke, his words smouldering with rage and contempt. Flavia caught perhaps a quarter of it, but when she heard the word _rómhánach_ , she knew his meaning even before Esca said in Latin, “He says you look like your father.”

And then she saw the stone on one of the fingers that curved round her chin, a stone she’d seen before only from a distance and in dim light. A great square emerald, carved with an intaglio of a dolphin at the apex of a leap.

The chamber seemed to fill with a red fog.

Dergdian’s bone-sword flashed in the lamp-light. Without a breath’s thought she was shoving her booted foot into his belly, and before he could recover she had her sword to hand. British, no _gladius_ , but it would do.

She had no more thoughts, as such, for the next several minutes. Or perhaps the next half-hour. Even at the noon hour on a battlefield, men lose track of time; she had not even the means of keeping it in that night-dark chamber with its seething gods. All she knew and all she would remember was the feel of Esca’s shoulder hard to hers, the ring of steel on steel, the grate of blade on bone, grunts, screams, and a sticky flow beneath the soles of her boots.

Her mind came back into focus just as she slid her sword deep into the spot beneath Dergdian’s ribcage. His eyes shot wide with pain, and with the knowledge that death had come for him. Alongside these things, contempt burned in them. Her nose nearly touching his, she hissed in broken Caledonian, _“Cá bhfuair tú fáinne ar mo athair?”_

_How got you my father’s ring?_

His breath was coming hoarse and shallow; blood dribbled from the corner of his lips to mix into his rancid sweat. Only malice seemed to keep him on his feet, though he swayed on them now, and to keep his eyes dancing with hatred. He drew them out, the last words he would ever speak, that they nearly slithered in the narrow band of air between them with his gloating. Flavia caught but three of them: _“rómhánach … marbh … meatachán.”_

_Roman… dead… coward._

Later, much later, she would be surprised at the clarity that attended her. No red mist clouded her eyes; the air did not seem to warp the sounds it contained, nor did time bend in that eerie manner in which it moved like a snail and a hawk all at once. There was only an ice-cold darkness within her, made of equal parts anger and delight, as she gave her right hand a sharp quarter-turn. The fire of hatred died out in his eyes as they rolled toward the roofing-stones and his own spit rattled in his throat. Then the Chieftain of the Seal People plummeted like a wet sack of meat to the slippery floor.

Flavia dropped to one knee beside him. Seizing his weaponless sword-hand, she yanked the ring from it with force enough to have severed the finger. The cold metal embraced her own finger like a broad-shouldered soldier embracing his small daughter in the warm Etruscan sun.

The emerald glinted as Esca grabbed her wrist. Before he could hiss, “Let’s _go!”_ , she already had her sword back in its belt and the Eagle back in her hands. This time they ran straight across the ring of jadite. The axe-head and the bases of the hindmost stones were darkening with blood; the tramp of their feet could not have defiled the holy chamber any further.

In the pale dawn they tore madly up the valley wall, down the rugged cliff-face, across the glen, and down the outer hill to the shore. By the time they regained the encampment, the sun had risen, but the sleeping bodies of warriors, old ones and new ones, still covered the sand.

“Who betrayed us, did he say?” Flavia gasped as they seized the reins of two sturdy horses, one roan and one grey, dozing under coarse blankets and hung with saddle-bags. Her bad thigh had begun to ache from the crazed run.

“No,” Esca panted. “Likely one was awake and saw movement, then woke the Chieftain and the two others. The damned discs must have sealed their suspicions.”

“Esca?” came a piping voice.

They both looked down, whence the voice had come.

“Caílte,” Esca said softly, kneeling that he could look the seven-year-old son of Prince Liathan in the eye.

The boy spoke plaintively, his eyes wide. Flavia caught the words for _leaving_ and _father_ and _why?_ She kept silent as she mounted the roan, but her heart pounded in her ears. All that stealth, all that bloodshed, and at the end of it were they to be betrayed by a little child?

Esca’s words to Caílte were calm, fond, authoritative. Flavia caught the gist of it. She did not relax entirely when she saw the boy’s face settle into a sort of acceptance. But when Esca produced a little carved fish out of his tunic, and Caílte broke into a grin, she let out a soft breath.

 _“Slán leat, a Esca,”_ Caílte said.

 _“Slán leat, mo buachaill cróga,”_ Esca replied, ruffling his hair one last time.

Caílte raised his head and said, a hint of shyness in his voice, _“Slán leat, a Bhean Flavia.”_

She smiled at him suddenly. _“Slán leat, a Chaílte.”_

They rode from the encampment quietly, so as not to wake the men or raise Caílte’s suspicions. When the tents had disappeared behind them, they dug their heels into the horses’ sides, driving them hard through the wet sand.

***

Sitting in wait for battle had always far more unnerved Flavia than actually fighting it. But neither had ever spawned half as much terror in her as did taking flight from the Seal People. Whether or not Caílte betrayed them, his elders, she knew, would soon be on their heels.

“Five days to the Wall,” Esca told her, after the long ride down the desolate shore and the turn eastward back along the River Cluta into the broad heaths and thick forests of the interior Highlands. “If we ride hard enough, perhaps four.”

When last she’d ridden so hard, her right leg had been whole. As she and Esca led their mounts up a stony bank, a spear of pain shot up from her thigh into her groin. Flavia stumbled.

“Your wound pains you again, doesn’t it?” Esca demanded, looking back toward her. “Why didn’t you say?”

“It’s… nothing,” she gritted out from between her teeth.

“‘Nothing,’ my arse.” He brought both their horses to a stop. “Do you sit down, Flavia.”

“We haven’t the time!” she insisted.

“If you lame yourself for good we’ll never escape them. Sit you down.”

She shot him a baleful look but obeyed, settling herself on a squat stone. Esca pulled his tunic over his head; the sun gilded the hard muscles of his chest round the sinuous blue writhings of ink. Producing his workaday knife from his saddle-pack, he cut a long strip from the hem, all the way round, and sliced it open into a flat band. Then he knelt at Flavia’s feet.

She went immediately from pale to hot-flushed as his hands fell on the top and outer side of her bad thigh. Though his head was lowered to his task, she could perceive colour rising in what she could see of his cheeks as he wound the band of wool twice round her thigh, tightly, and tied it off with a tight knot.

“There,” he said, rising without meeting her eyes at first. “Enough of a brace to get you by for the while. Would that we could light a fire and boil willow-bark, but they’d scent us out.”

“I’ve no need of willow-bark,” Flavia muttered, glad his eyes were turned from her face. And then she rose again and, as her leg twinged in protest, gave the lie to her words with her tremulous step.

Without a word, Esca threw his arm round her waist and pulled her against him. She made no protest as, bearing up part of her weight, he took the bridles of both horses in hand and led them all further up the bank.

Seldom did they spare breath for speech, and that as hushed as they could make it. Across the endless moors and hills, under a low and leaden sky, they heard nothing but their own hard breathing and the snorts of the horses, the beat of the hooves against the earth below them, bird-song, and the wind through the scrubby pines and the dun-coloured heather. Until the second evening, when the wind carried faintly to them men’s voices and men’s war-songs, along with the crunch of boots in deadfall, the baying of hounds, and the hot and acrid scent of fire.

Esca, catching Flavia’s look of alarm, said, “They’re half a day behind. The wind always lies.” But he set his mouth in a tight line and jabbed his heels into the sides of the grey, which sprung ahead of the roan. Flavia, her right thigh throbbing sullenly within its cage of wool, goaded her own horse to catch up to his.

Daylight had lingered long into the evening hours, as it does in the Highland summer. But it died away in tattered remnants as the sky finally opened up on them. The rain, icy even at this time of year, soaked their garments through; and the western wind was not the gentle one of Flavia’s girlhood but a blasting gale that drew all the heat up and out of their sodden skins and clothes.

It did not last long in what Esca said was local reckoning; a few hours, if that. “‘Not long,’” Flavia later muttered in disgust as she clutched her arms about herself and shivered. She lay within a hollow in the ground, sheltered from the wind by an uprooted pine. Not far away, the knee-hobbled horses grazed the scrubby ground. Esca had left to search for food. He’d the foresight to hang a pouch full of dried meat from his belt, next to the flint-pouch, before coming to her in the women’s tent. But even with careful parcelling-out it had lasted them only a few days.

At length she heard foot-falls not far away, and with shaking fingers she clenched the pommel of the sword. Her fear ebbed when she heard Esca’s wren-whistle, and she answered with a soft one of her own. On the heels of the human bird-song came a shrill squeal. Startled, Flavia half-rose on her elbows. 

“Our supper,” Esca announced softly as he crawled into the hollow beside her. In his hand he held a vole by its naked tail.

Flavia frowned. “You said we cannot light a fire.”

“Nor will we,” Esca said as he snapped the little beast’s neck. Producing his workaday knife from his belt, he cut a long gash in the vole’s side, then began to suck from it.

Flavia’s stomach heaved hard. It flipped over when Esca raised his head from the vole, his mouth wet with blood as it had been in the arena, and held the creature out to her. When she didn’t take it, merely stared at him in nauseated horror, his brows drew down over his eyes.

“Your blood’s soaked through your braccae and the bandage,” he hissed. “How do you intend to replace it? You must, if we’re to go on. If you don’t wish to die, you’ll have a few bites, or at least drink the creature’s blood.”

She swallowed and, with a silent prayer to Mithras that she would not disgrace herself by vomiting, nodded and held out her hands.

The rodent was far cleaner than its counterpart in the Roman sewers would have been, she’d give it that, scented with bog and salt rather than shit and piss. But the raw flesh was obscenely soft and chewy between her teeth, and the taste of the blood reminded her of past injuries to her own mouth. She forced herself to imagine she drew the life-force from the vole as she ate, though said force had already fled on the breaking of the animal’s neck. The imagery abated her nausea, her belly accepted the savage meal, and a measure of her strength seemed to return.

When she’d eaten her fill she held out the rest to Esca, who took only a few more bites before pressing it on her once more. Flavia shook her head, and he took the drained little corpse by its tail and rose again. Presently she heard a faint splash, and several minutes later Esca returned again to the hollow.

“Won’t it float downriver to them?” Flavia whispered.

“Between water-bloat and insects,” he whispered back, “it’s less likely to draw them to us than were I to toss it into the heather or bury it.”

With that, he pulled her to him. But it was not their sweet, sated embrace in the Chieftain’s tent. They were rank with grime and sweat, their mouths redolent of raw flesh, her thigh yet oozed blood, and mortal terror does anything but stir the embers of desire. They pressed together as she had done with any number of soldiers, merely for the warmth of one another’s bodies and the reassurance that, for now, each of them was not all alone.

***

On the afternoon of third day, the grey horse went down.

Flavia swallowed her cry of _Esca!_ for fear of it reaching the ears of their hunters. Relief flooded her immediately as he rolled away unpinned from the heavy, trembling body, struck only by the blood-flecked foam spattering from the poor beast’s muzzle. His grey-blue eyes full of sadness as well as fear, he drew his blade across the horse’s throat while the other rested gently on its pale neck. 

They rode on, both of them on the roan. Ill-rested, ill-fed, now bearing two riders and their bags instead of one, it plodded ever and ever more slowly across the moor — until well into the evening, when it could not take another step, would likely not have even under the lash.

They slid from it, then, Esca’s dismount graceful, Flavia’s a shamble broken only by, as always, the sturdiness of his shoulder beneath hers and his arm about her torso. He packed the contents of one saddle-bag in with those of the other and slung the latter over his shoulder. Leaving the roan to the Seal People or whoever else found it first, they stumbled not ahead but down to the pale-silver froth of the Cluta, tearing through alder scrub and tripping over stones that shot arrows of fire up Flavia’s leg.

And then they were in the water, its cold making the storm of the passing night seem like a _calidarium_. The breath seemed to solidify in Flavia’s lungs, and needles of ice worked their way into her skin through her ragged clothes, numbing them, weighing them down, weighing down the saddle-bag in which Esca carried the Eagle. The only blessing was that the cold quieted the anger of her wound. She hoped to Mithras she would not take infection from whatever filth might lie in the water.

Esca pulled them both beneath a steep overhang, holding tight to Flavia’s shoulders. Sodden and chilled himself, he provided barely any heat to her now. They listened, her heart fairly splashing in the water, to the baffled and frustrated calls above their heads, the hounds panting and growling.

It seemed an eternity before the noises of the hunt began to die away. Flavia sent up a silent prayer of thanks that, at this hour, even in this everlasting day, little enough of her Father’s Light remained to call out the marks of her and Esca’s crashing slide through the scrub — or their pale faces against the dark of the bank-shelter.

It seemed an even longer eternity they spent dragging themselves upstream through the bitter waters. “We must stick to the river,” Esca said before they moved on; “they’ll double back soon enough.” Every step was a fresh battle: whether they were up to the knees in the tilting shallows or up to the waist in the powerful current, the mud constantly shifted beneath their feet, the numbing cold of the water made them clumsy, and the terror of discovery had ceased to lend them speed and begun to eat away at what strength they had left.

Flavia tried to cherish the numbness of her wound and ignore that in the rest of her legs. But, just as one can ignore the growls of one’s belly only for so long before one must have sustenance, her will became less and less the equal of her body — wounded, exhausted, poorly fed, the heat sucked out of every pore. By the time they — _Mithra gratio_ — discovered the cave through which part of the Cluta ran, Esca had begun to simply push Flavia’s half-dead weight over short waterfalls and ridges of built-up silt. He all but carried her over a threshold where the water didn’t even rise to the ankles of their boots.

She blinked in the sudden brightness of the early morning that seemed to quiver round her like an aspic. Then she registered how much lighter her clothes felt on her skin. Under her arse and legs was hard, wet rock. A ledge at the mouth of a cave. Hopefully not the same entrance they’d found last night. The Cluta rushed by them no more than a few paces away, beyond the rocky shelter, a soft rain falling into and replenishing its waters.

“You need to rest,” Esca huffed.

“Can’t,” Flavia choked out. “No… time.” She tried to leverage herself up from the rock, only to slide down it and convulse against it. The cold seemed to be purged from her body by a strange, sickly heat blossoming through her veins.

“You must. Or you’ll _die,”_ Esca snarled.

“I… I can’t,” she muttered, voice dry and hoarse.

“Yes, you can, you’ll be able to, after you’ve rested,” Esca said sternly, but his voice was shot through with fear.

With hands that shook as the heat pulsed through them, Flavia reached for the saddle-bag and dug through it. She thrust out the bird-shaped burden in her hands toward Esca.

“Do... do you take the Eagle. If you find fresh horses, come back.” Her lungs heaved with a sputtering cough. “If not… keep going south, to Eburacum. Bring the Eagle back to Rome for me.”

Esca shook his dripping head. “I will not leave you here, Flavia.”

Fear seized her, not the mortal terror of the last several days but old fear, fear she’d tasted since the age of ten. “Do not dishonour me, Esca. Take the Eagle.”

His eyes were as fiery as when first they’d met in her uncle’s atrium. “I came this far with you. I shall not leave you now.”

The centurion she’d been stirred to life beneath her feverish skin. “Esca. I order you. _Take it.”_

He stared down at her, his face as stony as it had been back then… so long ago.

“I swore an oath of honour, on my father’s blade, that I would never abandon you,” he said, his voice full of the quiet rage of the gravely insulted. “My honour comes far before obedience to any man — or woman, _Domina_ Flavia Aquila.” He fell silent a moment, then said grimly, “If you want me to leave, you will have to free me. Set me free... _domina.”_

She stared at him once more, his sharp features wavering before her eyes in the mist, in her fever. His demand confused her at first; she had no quill, no parchment, no magistrate to witness his manumission.

But, she realised, she still had his bond.

Once more she reached into the saddle-bag. Her palm and fingers longed to once more wrap snugly about the little carved man with his outstretched arms. But, instead, she curled them about the blade, marked as Esca himself was marked, and by the blade she raised his father’s dagger into the air between them, the man above her fist making supplication to the heavens.

 _“Te libero, mi amate,”_ she whispered.

Esca did not take the dagger from her. He instead clasped both his hands about her one that held the blade and held it steadily for a long, long second. And his eyes held hers, steady, dark, and faintly wet.

When he released her hand, Flavia hefted up the Eagle to him again, “Take it,” she rasped.

He pushed it back against her breastbone. “No.”

With a new flare of indignation, Flavia opened her mouth to speak. Before she could he dropped to one knee before her, slid a chill hand against the chill nape of her neck, and brushed his lips against hers. Once, firmly, decisively. He raised his head again and said, words as weighty as those of any oath sworn in a Roman court, “I will return.”

Then his hand was gone, and he was gone too.

On the cold rock, in the strength-draining damp, Flavia wrapped her shaking hot-cold body round the hard, heatless bundle. Cradled between the Eagle and a vision of the bull she would buy and sacrifice to Mithras when first she could — if Esca returned, and she had not died of fever first, and the Seal People did not find them before they gained the wall — she sank into a slumber racked with bloody, half-coherent dreams.

After a long while, she woke to cold damp again. But her clothes seemed slightly warmer now, as if she’d drenched them with sweat, and no traces of the sickly heat lingered in her veins.

It would come back sooner than Esca might, did she not shift herself to drier ground.

For a long moment she prepared herself. During their flight east and south she had tucked the pouch containing the little olive-wood bird into her tunic to keep it safe. Now she drew it out, and with unsteady fingers she freed the carving from the bag. Twenty years of her touch had polished the wood smooth and dark; many details of the feathers had long since become worn away. Round and round she turned it in her fingertips, and in her mind’s eye she watched her father’s blade-point describe each pinion until, in the eyes of the child she had been, the little creature seemed ready to fly from his hands.

And soon she, too, was ready, her own knife to hand.

She shepherded her last reserves of strength jealously. The one bird secured back within its pouch and inside her tunic, she moved slowly to the mouth of the cave to tend to the other bird. There stood an alder, and from it she cut a sturdy branch as long as she was tall. Half-sitting, half-lying on the rock, she shucked it of leafy twigs, of bark. Slowly, steadily, thoroughly. She had to whittle one end of it down a bit, that it would fit into the socket at the base of the Eagle. But, in the end, it slid home like a long-lost ring onto a finger.

For the first time in sixteen years, the Eagle of the Ninth Legion rose in Caledonia, and Flavia Aquila, daughter of Marcus Flavius Aquila, rose along with it.

Her path out of the cave, into the waning sunlight, was slow and steady. She leaned on the Eagle, leaned on Rome, until neither hard rock nor wavering silt but firm mossy soil was beneath her feet. And there, she planted the standard.

And, there, to her, they came.

 _It’s said that when the mists roll down from the high moors, one almost expects the red crests of the Ninth to come marching thunderously out of them,_ had said Claudius Hieronimianus. Before her was no moor, just the Cluta with the noon-day sun sparkling upon it. But across its waters marched three dozen men carrying the long, broad shields of Rome. 

Though their hair and beards and moustaches flowed like those of British men, the armour of Roman soldiers glinted under their shabby cloaks, and the helms of Roman soldiers capped their heads. Under the beards, Flavia saw the aquiline noses of Romans and Greeks, and the snubbed ones of native Britons. Among them, too, were Spaniards and Gauls, Germans and Illyrians, Thracians and Africans, droplets of the great Roman wave that had crashed over Brittania’s shores for near to seventy years.

Leading them was the man called Guern the Hunter, named Lucius Gaius Metellus, of the First Cohort of the Ninth Legion. And at his side was Esca, son of Cunoval, he of the Five Hundred Spears.

Guern walked up to Flavia, and he fixed her with his bright black eyes.

“Forgive me, _domina,”_ he said gravely. “When last we met, I told you a falsehood, out of my own shame. I saw your father struck down in battle. He stood his ground against the Chieftain of the Seal People. But all of us were hungry, thirsty, ill-rested, and feverish. The Chieftain’s spear took him in the heart. He fell, and the Eagle fell with him.”

Flavia gripped the shaft of the standard and closed her eyes. _Thank thee, O Mithra. Thank thee._

When she opened them again, Guern still stood before her. “Give us our orders, _domina,”_ he said.

She looked them over, middle-aged and old men with the bright eyes of the young and battle-ready. And the centurion’s voice welled up in her lungs for the first time in two years: “Prepare to defend the Eagle!”

And with the jink and clang of armour they prepared, lining up in rows, tarnished and paintless shields held before them as though they gleamed red and gold and new.

Across the Cluta, the shapes of men leapt lightly from tree-branch to river-bank, three dozen to Flavia’s three dozen. Under the blue-grey mud, their faces were hard, and not just with the hardness of battle. In their eyes, Flavia saw the rage of the dishonoured host. She and Esca had told them utter lies, eaten at their board, slept amongst their nobles, violated their holiest shrine, slain their chieftain, beguiled his small grandson, and absconded with their most sacred possession.

She remembered how in Judaea hospitality was no luxury but life or death, for only hospitality permitted travellers to survive in that bare and brutal land. He who violated it, either as host or as guest, could never expect it again. And she understood that even if Caledonia’s wilds were not as unforgiving as Judaea’s, its outraged hosts most certainly would be.

To win, or to die in battle. That was the choice before her and Esca.

Eyes blazing, Liathan, Prince of the Seal Prince, stepped to the forefront of his men. “Esca!” he called out, and Esca’s head rose. Flavia saw the guilt flash in his eyes before he masked his face.

Liathan called out one angry sentence, which Esca would translate for her much, much later: _Behold the fate of all betrayers!_ She saw Esca’s throat bob in response, and there was a pang in her heart: she did not know that she herself could ever have stood with a barbarian tribe against Rome.

It was not until Liathan looked over his shoulder, and one of his men dragged Caílte forward to his father, that she realised he had not spoken of Esca.

The boy looked, more than anything else, puzzled, his eyes and mouth wide circles as his gaze darted from his father and Esca and back again. Liathan put what seemed, at first, to be a protective hand about his shoulders. He handed his spear to the other man, then moved behind his son.

With his axe in the hand that was not holding Caílte, he drew back his arm. Though his eyes were at first cold as they held Esca’s, his face contorted as he pulled the blade across his son’s throat. Flavia heard the cry stick in Esca’s throat, and, she thought, she could see Liathan’s eyes gleam wetly in the dappled light.

She felt so cold, colder than she had ever felt in the depths of the Cluta. Colder than she had felt when she twisted her blade in the heart of the Chieftain. And her mind, again, was perfectly clear. If she lived to be an ancient crone, she would always remember every tiny motion of Caílte’s that made up the sag of his small body in his father’s embrace; the accusation in his dark eyes before they went empty and sightless; how tenderly Liathan broke his fall; how softly he laid him down in the ebb of the shallows.

 _“Out swords!”_ she bellowed.

Thirty-six blades clanged against the tops of shields. Liathan bawled his own order, and he and his men hurtled across the fallen body of his son and across the river.

Boots slammed into shields, and Liathan catapulted himself across the heads of Flavia’s men to land in their midst. His warriors’ cries echoed off Roman metal, and river-water kicked up by boots sprayed across them all.

Thrust and parry, strike and block, lunge and duck. Flavia had not sparred with Esca for three months, had not been been in the Army for two years; her fever was fresh-broken, and she’d eaten too little in days. But her sinews held their memories, and it might have been just yesterday that she’d stood in the field at Isca. She was the savior of a century of men. She was a veteran of Judaea. She was a soldier and a leader of soldiers, trained by the most fearsome military that man, or woman, had ever known. 

She was the child of Marcus Flavius Aquila, who had died with honour.

The battle did not last very long. he thought, later, that Liathan had gravely miscalculated in slaying Caílte before them all, turning himself and his men from worthy enemy to be vanquished, to rabid dogs to be put down. She wondered how many of the men who’d answered Esca’s call had seen their own sons, their own grandsons, in Caílte’s face as his father cut his throat.

Not enough of them remained standing, at the end of it. Twenty, if that, including Guern the Hunter. But each and every Seal Warrior lay in the river, floating face-down or staring blindly up into an unconcerned sky.

Flavia and Esca waded amongst them, looking for signs of life to be quelled lest a man rise up and strike them anew. A knot formed inside the embrasure of her ribs. There beside Liathan lay Aodh, lover to Emer; there lay Còmhall, betrothed to Sadhbh. There lay the lovers and betrotheds and husbands of other women she’d known: Eochaidh, Suibhne, Ruairidh, Oisian, and a one whose name she’d never learned but whom she’d come to recognize by his sharp-shaped red brows.

_I would not have taken them from you, had I the choice. Whatever they have done, may Mithras guide their steps into the Light. May you and your children all find solace in your kin and friends who remain, and may you all love again, if you wish it._

After they’d bound up their battle-wounds, they spent the remainder of the day-light hewing trees and cutting turf for a great pyre. “For our enemies, as well as our fellows,” Flavia ordered. “We fought with honour, and we shall take our victory with honour: we shall not descend to desecrate their remains. Not least that of the child.” Her words earned her grave-eyed looks and solemn nods all round.

With the fires of battle burnt out in all of them, it was hard work, and it was heart-sore work. With each swing of an axe taken from a dead Seal Warrior, the rejuvenated Roman soldiers of the British wilds seemed to feel more and more of their years come back to them. But the pyre was finished before the sun had sunk too deeply into the tree-crowns on the river’s opposite bank. Just as each fallen soldier was laid upon it in his full armour, each fallen warrior was laid upon it in his seal-skins, his amulets of bone untouched; and the living carefully tucked sticks and bark and sod about the dead.

Not long after the last Seal Warrior had fallen, Caílte had been gathered up from the Cluta and laid upon the bank. Now, Esca, face drained and eyes haunted, lifted the small limp figure in his arms, drying what dampness remained as best he could on his own blood-stained tunic and braccae. At the pyre, he handed the boy over to the tallest of the soldiers, who gently laid Caílte mac Liathan mac Dergdian upon the highest point. Flavia, who had taken up a rowan blossom a moment before, snapped its flowerlets apart and scattered them over the child.

Flint and steel hissed behind her, and then Guern strode into her line of sight, a torch in his right hand. Something occurred to Flavia, and she held up her own hand, her hand that now bore her father’s ring.

“Hold,” she said. “I have something for the child to take beyond the sunset with him.” And she drew the little olive-wood bird from its pouch one last time.

Caílte’s hands had stiffened, so she could but lay the bird loosely within them. She thought of them in life, eagerly grasping the fish that Esca had carved. Olive-wood, to be fired along with birch and rowan, just as Roman soldiers would be along with British warriors. Her father, avenged, and this last of the things he had made to take its rest along with him.

She stared for one last, long moment at the pyre. Then she nodded to Guern.

As flame rose up like one last and great blossom upon the pyre, she was aware of the men looking to her. Hoping she would speak. She had never been one for grand oratory; that was for legates and tribunes, not for centurions. But she found the words coming to her, easily and naturally:

“Let us all remember the men who fought and died here with honour. Romans, Britons, and the men of other nations that fight for Rome. My father, who led you; your comrades, who lived as Britons and who died today as Romans. Let us remember the child who was slain today. Peace be upon those who live and who remember him with love.

“Peace be on all of you, the quick and the dead, and the British women you have taken to wife, and the Roman-British children you raise with them in this beautiful and bracing land. May you who still live, live out your lives in peace and honour. May your children do honour to both their races, and their children’s children after them.

“May the souls of those who have died with honour take flight. May they soar against the sky like the Eagle of the Ninth Legion, which after so long, after so much calumny, has risen again.”

And she fell silent, and in silence, they watched the pyre burn down for a long time.

Darkness had almost fallen by the time most of the soldiers had begun to melt away into the wilds that had embraced them. They had fought as Romans, but they would live until they died as Britons. Guern the Hunter, too, made to disappear as well, but Flavia stopped him with a hand on his forearm.

“Lucius Gaius Metellus,” she said. “You are welcome to join us, if you wish. We are bound for Eburacum, where we shall return the Eagle. You need not stay there; you can return to your woman and children, and I am sure Rome will not let you return to them empty-handed.”

But he shook his head. _“Domina,_ I thank you for your offer. But… I am no longer Lucius Gaius Metellus, though that is my given name. I am called Guern the Hunter by all who cherish me. I may have fought as a Roman, but I am of the Selgovae, and I shall be so until I die, and my sons and daughter were born to the tribe. And even had I no woman or children, I could not picture myself again among other Romans.” He grinned his toothless grin again. “Most other Romans, that is. Lucius Gaius Metellus, for all that he returned briefly this afternoon, is dead to Rome, and the dead do not cross back over the Waters of Lethe.”

A strange sadness welled up in Flavia, a sadness not at all mitigated by her understanding that he was right. She offered him her arm, and he clasped it, Roman to Roman; Esca, too, approached him, and they clasped arms, Briton to Briton.

Then Guern drew back and said, “I expect I shall never look upon a Roman face again, nor hear my native tongue spoken, nor see any Eagle-standard raised. I must be on my way, and you on yours. Peace and honour unto you, Flavia Aquila and Esca mac Cunoval.”

The evening mists had already begun to rise. They were not many paces away when Flavia, unable not to, turned her head back to regard Guern a final time. The wild hair and moustaches of a tribesman, the tarnished but lasting armour of Rome — and, also of Rome, the precise motion of his arm as he raised it in salute. She returned the salute, former centurion to former centurion, each born into one life and come to another; and she held the salute until the mist drifted between them and Guern the Hunter disappeared.


	4. Eburacum

Guern the Hunter was not the very last once-Roman soldier they ever saw. The very last one fetched up a pair of shaggy Northern ponies for Flavia and Esca before he, too, faded away beyond whorls of cloud-thick air.

The days spent closing the distance between themselves and the Wall on the ponies were as uneventful as could be hoped for. Flavia was not of a mind to tarry. Salt-tarnished though the Eagle was, she could all but feel the bright burn of its gold through the saddle-bag, a beacon to any who might strike her and Esca down and abscond with it again. It was not a battle she could fight in her state, drained in body as she was from flight, battle, and the building of the pyre.

Too, despite the relief of the survivor and the satisfaction of one who has fulfilled her quest, all that had happened by the Cluta had left a darkness upon her heart. It surprised her, as she was no stranger to war, but there it was.

It did not comfort her much to espy now and again a quiet graveness to Esca’s face, one without ferocity, that she thought she hadn’t seen before. She wondered if he upbraided himself for the gift of the carven fish, if he thought they had betrayed Caílte more than he had betrayed them. But he said nothing of it, and she saw no wisdom in intruding upon his thoughts.

They bedded down together each night in blessedly dry bracken. But they were weary, unwashed, and heavy-hearted, and they took no pleasure of one another. Their greatest intimacy in their last few days in the North was to clasp hands as they fell to sleep. Flavia did not dream of vermin wriggling out of skull-holes, nor of chariots nor of surgeons’ blades. If Esca dreamed of his kin falling all about him, or of the arena, or of the light fading from Caílte’s dark eyes, nothing of his sleep betrayed it, nor did his own eyes in the light of morning.

The return to Cilurnum was somewhat more eventful than the departure from it. They had washed as best they could in a stream before approaching the northern gate. Flavia had bidden Esca crop her regrown hair, that she could pass for a man once again (which he did with a forlorn look that amused her). The gate-guards did not question her declared sex, but, not having recalled her and Esca from weeks before, they did sharply ask of her business in the North. At first she was unsure they would accept the tale of trade matters that Esca had helped her concoct. Perhaps it was her well-ingrained centurion’s bearing, or perhaps the battle by the Cluta had left something in her eyes that made men check their steps and their tongue. In any case, at last they opened the Southern gate, and it was with a mix of relief and trepidation that Flavia felt the arms of Rome close about her again.

She did not look at Esca straight away. She suspected there was little relief in his breast. But she did say, in a low voice, “I meant what I said, Esca. In the river-cave.”

He did not reply at first. Then he said, his voice tight, “We should trade the ponies in Cilurnum town for swifter horses.”

Swifter horses being better valued among the Romans than shaggy ponies, and Flavia and Esca having between them minimal coin, it took a fair degree of haggling on Esca’s part before the cold-eyed Votadini horse-trader would agree to exchage the ponies for a pair of geldings that had seen better days. “They’ll get us to Eburacum,” he said curtly after he’d led them back to Flavia.

***

After so many weeks, months, in which they’d trod on nothing but turf and sand, their boots were loud as crashing waves against the sharp-squared stones that floored the courtyard of Eburacum’s _principia_. Each deafening foot-fall echoed in the silence that fell about them like the mists of Caledonia as they made their way across the courtyard: Every officer and soldier, every courier and merchant and slave present ceased his conversation immediately upon sight of them, and all in their path drew themselves hastily out of the way.

Of course, Flavia thought, it was neither her nor Esca, strictly speaking, who commanded the attention. The courtyard was bathed in the morning summer sun, which danced and dappled on the gilt of the Eagle. Flavia clasped it hard to her ribs under her right arm, but even with the drab stripe of her tunic-sleeve against it, the men about them blinked at its brightness.

None blinked harder than the perfectly groomed Adonis, in a splendidly ornate cuirass and a great red cloak, who sat at the table at the far end of the _principia_.

 _“Ave,_ Tribune. Servius Placidus, I believe it was?” Flavia asked as she and Esca drew up to him. She didn’t bother to pitch her voice low, though she did suppress any and all notes of glee from it.

“It is … _domina,”_ Placidus said loudly, and a whisper tore through the crowd like storm-wind through bare branches. Though his voice was perfectly meet for his station and the setting, Flavia could yet hear a certain sourness in it. She smiled, then, and she lay the Eagle on the table before her.

“The Eagle of the Ninth Legion has flown home again,” she said, lifting her voice for all around them to hear, feeling power shudder within her as her words echoed off the stones. “My father, Marcus Flavius Aquila, died in its defence, Tribune. I have brought it back from the wildest end of the North, that I might restore his honour — and the honour of Rome.”

She recalled, just then, a fellow soldier she hadn’t thought of in years, a man whose wit had been both barbed and crass. More than once he’d said, _Fellow’s got a mouth like a cat’s arse-hole._ As Flavia gazed upon Placidus’s mouth, which was considerably less lovely in its current state, she thought she’d have to raise a glass to her comrade’s memory before long.

“Bravely done, _domina.”_

Flavia recognised the voice before she looked up into the dark face, its long eyes regarding her with as much appreciation as they had in her uncle’s atrium, along with a shine of something that looked very much like awe. Her face coloring, she lowered her eyes. “My profound thanks, Legate,” she said. “I am gratified that I could do one last service for Rome.”

“The Senate, I am sure, will wish to consider re-forming the Ninth Legion,” Claudius Hieronimianus said. “I would have seen you offered its command, _domina,_ but, as that may not be the most… practical of solutions, I _will_ see you rewarded, and richly. Placidus?”

The tribune, his eyes narrowed and his mouth still like a cat’s arse-hole, barked out an order. A lower-ranked officer, presumably the paymaster, disappeared into one of the small rooms behind Placidus’s table. He reappeared in short order with a clinking sack, which he handed to the tribune. Placidus opened it and counted out a not-very-great number of coins, which he pushed gracelessly across the table toward Flavia. “Your reward, _domina,”_ he said curtly.

“By the great, pendulous, wrinkled balls of Zeus, Placidus! This woman saved a century of men at Isca, and now she brings back a lost Eagle — and you would stint her so?”

If Flavia’s triumph had made Placidus look significantly less pretty, his beauty suffered even more when his legate berated him in public. With a face like a thundercloud, he replied, “I will raise the reward by half, sir. I admit, it was quite an accomplishment for a mere woman, and a cripple at that, accompanied by nobody but a painted barbarian slave.”

“Freedman,” Flavia said coolly.

The tribune raised an eyebrow. “I am sure you had…. _good reason_ for freeing him, _domina.”_ He let the implication hang in the air, amidst titillated whispers.

Flavia smiled. Esca’s predatory smile. “Your jealousy does not become you, Tribune.”

Had Placidus been sipping wine at the moment he’d have sprayed it across the table. “You think I am jealous of him?” He raked his eyes scornfully up and down Flavia. “Trust me, I have had much better.”

She leaned forward over the table and said, quietly but not so quietly that it would not carry in the rapt silence, “Not of him, Tribune. Of me. And, no, you could never have ‘much better.’”

Placidus turned crimson as sniggers rose round them. Flavia darted a look at Esca, who was smirking openly as well. Hieronimianus, who stood grinning with his arms folded across his bronze breastplate, said, “Double the reward, Placidus.”

“I am not certain we’ve the resources, sir,” the tribune said weakly, a final protest.

“Are you telling me that the most powerful Army in the world hasn’t enough coin to spare for this heroine of the Empire?” The note of amusement died as Hieronimianus’s voice softened. “Or, rather, that you and the paymaster under your supervision have not managed the resources of Eburacum well enough?”

There was dead silence in the basilica. If Placidus had looked thunderous a moment before, now he looked slightly ill. The paymaster looked ready to faint.

“Of course not, sir. The reward shall be doubled.”

“Excellent.” It were as if a sluice gate had opened and all the good nature flooded back into the legate’s voice. _“Domina_ Aquila, have you this man’s manumission papers with you?”

“Unfortunately, sir, the manumission is by the bond of my word only, for the moment,” Flavia replied. “We’ve only just ridden out of the North, and there’s been no time to formalise the matter.”

Hieronimianus smiled. “Well, then, unless you are in a pressing hurry to reach Calleva, I would suggest you remain in Eburacum another day. I would be honoured to accompany you both to the magistrate’s quarters in the afternoon to have Esca officially made your freedman.” He paused. “A necessary step if I am to later appeal to the Senate to make him a full citizen of Rome.”

A stalk of hay falling to the floor would have made a din in the ensuing silence. Esca’s head came up sharply as he stared, wide-eyed, at Hieronimianus. Flavia herself struggled to keep her jaw shut.

Finally, Esca said, his voice husky, “That is extremely generous of you, sir. I cannot thank you enough.”

The legate shook his head, black eyes warm. “It is Rome who cannot thank either of you enough.” He clapped his hands, and a slave-boy stepped forward. “Caius, this woman and this man are our honoured guests for today and tonight. Do you put them up in one of the guest chambers. Have another slave ask round in the _canabae_ and find serviceable clothing for her. And let the cooks know there will be two more places at the officers’ table for dinner.”

***

Flavia closed the door of the chamber behind her. Esca was already seated on the edge of the bed, smiling the overwhelmed half-smile that had been on his face most of the day.

“That was… quite the dinner,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

He laughed quietly and shook his head. “It was a bit wasted on us, was it not? It’ll be some time before either of us can eat much more than half a boiled egg at one sitting. Ah, well, the others had a feast, and the kitchen-slaves will enjoy what we could not.”

“You certainly had the belly for the wine,” she observed.

“Oh, that I did. I never thought I’d be grateful to be drinking Roman wine instead of British mead. But I didn’t drink as much as I’d have liked; I didn’t wish to disgrace myself before the legate. A wonderful man, he is.” The smile sharpened into a grin. “Nor did I wish to become too insensate to appreciate his tribune sulking all evening.” Flavia burst into laughter. Esca continued: “And, of course, we’ll be riding south again in the morning, and I’d fain not be puking over the side of the horse.”

He paused, with a cautious eye on Flavia, his smile gone, before he continued. “When we get back to Calleva, and I can greet your uncle man to man, instead of slave to master, the three of us shall celebrate by getting very, very drunk.”

Flavia’s eyes pricked. She hadn’t had the time or strength to think much on old Aquila in weeks. She missed him terribly; she hoped he fared well and had not eaten himself alive with worry for her. She looked forward to seeing the pride in his eyes when she told him of the Eagle. And, she realised, she did want to see him and Esca clasp arms as equals, and as the two men dearest to her in life.

“And after that….” Esca trailed off there.

She blinked at him. “Lie in bed holding our heads all the next day?”

With a groan of exasperation he seized a cushion and threw it at her; she ducked it nimbly. “No, you brave, valiant idiot. What shall we do, after we’ve had our home-coming? You’ll have your reward, hopefully I’ll have my citizenship, but …”

“Do you know how to farm?” The question popped out before she’d had a chance to consider.

He stared at her. “Do you jest? I was raised to wield a sword, not a plough. I know horses, of course, but nothing else of livestock, and even less of crops.”

She smiled, scooping up the cushion and tossing it back onto the bed. “Well, I’ve no experience at it, but my family has farming as well as fighting in our blood. I shall have to favor my leg, but I wouldn’t be the first wounded soldier to retire to farming — and I’m quite hale otherwise, and you the same. I’ll have enough reward money not only to raise a small house and buy a cow and some fowl, but hire a bit of help as well. And they say the land to the west of Calleva, on the Downs, is rich and fertile.”

Esca continued to stare at her. The half-smile reappeared. She felt her own smile widen. “Then you are with me on this?”

”I am ‘with you’ no matter what you decide. Also, you’re very lovely when you blush like that, have you ever been told? Do you come sit next to me.”

She lowered herself to the edge of the bed. His arm wound about her shoulders, and she turned her head toward him. It was a long, unhurried kiss, unconstrained by mortal fear or prying eyes. It ended in shortened breaths and his hand upon the fibula at her shoulder.

“Shall I douse the lamp?” she whispered.

”No, not yet. I wish to see you, all of you, in the light.”

She stiffened slightly, and he sighed against her neck. “Flavia, please don’t tell me you can’t bear to be taken except in half-darkness and under a pile of rugs.”

“No, that is not—” She broke off, then looked down at the floor. “I am... terribly scarred.”

“Yes, and?” 

She wished he would stop moving his lips against her neck like that; it was distracting her from what she wished to say. “Not just my thigh. I’ve been stabbed several times. I’ve a burn mark on my right side from a flaming arrow. It is… not very pretty.”

“Again, what of it? You’ve seen my back any number of times; it’s not pretty, either.”

“It is… different for a woman,” she managed.

He raised his head from the crook of her neck and regarded her, his eyes grave.

“I told you once that I had never lacked for women’s company as a chieftain’s son, and did not lack it completely as a slave. Had I wanted a celebrated beauty of Rome, or a soft-skinned young girl, I would be more than capable of finding one, and one who wanted me in turn, at that.” His hand cupped her face, and he drew his finger across her lower lip. She remembered him drawing his thumb across it. It seemed so long ago.

“But I do not want either, Flavia. And that is why I am here. I want to see you, all of you, and if I have to touch each scar on you with my hands or mouth before you can believe that, that is what I will do.”

She closed her eyes hard and inhaled deeply. She was not going to cry. She opened them again to the feel of Esca undoing the fibula, removing it from her shoulder, and placing it on the side-table. The top of the stola tumbled down into her lap and behind her back.

“Stand,” he said, still sombre-eyed.

She rose, and he with her. The stola fell in a circle round her feet. His fingers clutched at her undertunic. “Lift your arms,” he whispered. She did, and he drew it off her, slowly, almost reverently.

She wore only a _subligaculum_ now, but he didn’t lower his arms to untie its laces. He sat back down on the bed and pulled her closer, holding her round the waist. She watched his eyes on her, and then his hand following his eyes, brushing over the short faded scar on her breast-bone before sliding down to cup one breast; sliding over the mark of the sword-thrust on her left side; then crossing her belly to stroke the flesh left puckered by fire on the right side.

His voice was husky now. “Turn round.”

Her face was burning, but she obeyed. Now he undid the knots on one side of her subligaculum, then the other. The undergarment came away in his hand. She closed her eyes in embarrassment as she heard the choked-back laughter she had feared.

“You were stabbed in the _arse_ , too?”

“Don’t laugh at me, damn you!” she huffed.

“Learn to laugh at _yourself_ , would you? Scarred or not, it’s a very shapely arse” — he smoothed his hand over one buttock, then the other — “but you have to admit, someone being stabbed in the arse is funny. So long as it’s not me, that is. How did you heal from that wound without revealing yourself to the surgeons — or the sword-thrust or the burn, for that matter?”

“By not telling the surgeons at all.”

A few seconds of stunned silence, and then an incredulous, “And how in the name of all the gods are you not dead of infection many times over?”

“There was a shop in Hierosolyma whose proprietor made and sold all manner of concoctions. I posed as a young physician with little experience in mixing remedies and bought from him a jar of copper salve, the sort that preserves wounds from corruption. Three weeks’ pay, worth every _nummus_. That, plus compression, sufficed for every wound I got until Isca. Oh, and vinegar,” she added. “After I took this wound, I wheedled an amphora of vinegar and a big shallow bowl out of a storeroom guard. I can’t remember what load-of-shit story I told him. Then I took both out into the woods, poured the one into the other, unwound the linen I’d wrapped round myself, and sat down. I was very happy I’d brought along a little leather _bursa_ to bite into.”

She heard him laughing again, softly, not mocking this time. “Amazing, you are. And you think I’d rather be with a sheltered, bored specimen of what Romans deem ‘respectable’ womanhood?” He pulled her closer to him and pressed his lips against the small of her back.

“Ooh.” Her own reaction startled her.

“Liked that, did you?” He kissed the hollow of flesh again, taking his time, keeping his touch light and grazing, holding her in place by her hips as she squirmed. When she began to arch her back instead, he moved his hands round to her front; the left one slid upward and cupped her left breast, tweaking the nipple, while the other slipped between her thighs and began to trace the cleft of her cunt. She shifted, planting her feet further apart, and heard his quick intake of breath before he worked one finger halfway inside her.

“Wet,” he said, his voice muffled against her back. “Not wet enough.”

“Wet enough for...?” she gasped, undulating in his hands.

“Stupid question.” Suddenly he turned her completely round and pulled her downward, moving backward on the bed, so that she landed face-down atop him. He shifted upward, pushing a familiar hardness into her good thigh. “For _that,_ Flavia.”

Out of pure instinct, she gripped his shoulders and bore down hard against it, shifting her own body until it rested against the juncture of her thighs, then grinding slowly and deliberately. His mouth slackened, and his eyes went wide before they closed. He uttered a groan that ended in an unfamiliar British word.

“What did you say?”

“I’ll tell you another time.” He was sliding both hands up and down her sides and taking in her naked form with both eyes. She thought he looked ever so slightly dizzy.

“Do I not get to see you as well?” she said with a faint smile.

His own smile broadened. He eased himself out from under her and stood beside the bed. Without ceremony or hesitation, he grasped the hem of his tunic and pulled it over his head, then dropped it to the floor and moved his hands to the laces of his braccae. Within a few breaths he stood naked before her, cock rigid and flushed with blood. 

She sat up on the bed and reached for him, as he had done her. One hand slid up the flat belly and broad chest, tracing the familiar blue markings. The other curled decisively round his cock. He caught a deep, dragging breath and seemed to surge forward in her grasp, his cock swelling in it, beating like a second heart against her palm.

Without thinking, she leaned forward and kissed the tip. He jerked under her hands, uttering a short, sharp cry. She looked up in surprise to see him looking down at her, heavy-lidded, lips parted.

“I… would be delighted for you to continue that another time, but if you do so now I shall not last.” She had never heard him speak so hoarsely. “However—” Rather than finishing the thought, he pushed her backward on the bed again and slid downward against her.

“Esca, what are you doing?”

He moved her thighs apart. “Do you be quiet and lie still.”

”But — _oh!_ — won’t doing that — _aah!_ — befoul your breath?”

“No more than what you did a moment ago will befoul your own. Each of us bathed not five hours ago, and perhaps it’s escaped your notice but we’ve not spent those five hours running for our lives or wallowing in mud. Idiot Romans…”

He said no more for a while, too busy tracing the soft inner lips of her cunt with his tongue while holding the outer ones gently apart in his fingers. She lay quiescent at first, panting, staring at the ceiling, feeling herself grow swollen and open under his tongue. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t enough, she wanted more contact, and she tried to squirm upward. Each time she did, he would lean his forearms upon her thighs, pinning them down, and turn his face away. Only when she had subsided again would he resume the maddeningly slow and deliberate licking.

She raised her head slightly and looked down; she caught his eyes, or, more accurately, he caught hers. His were dark in the full light, watching her closely, calculating. A heart’s pulse later she felt his tongue move slightly higher, touching her _landica_ , and she gasped and groaned.

He leaned his face into her a bit harder and she felt him take the small bit of flesh between his lips, sucking hard, letting it go, tracing it with his tongue when it fell away from him, then sucking it back in again. She strained against him, hips rising into his jaw as it worked, hands fisted in his hair. He didn’t press her back down now but held steady, as if to a ship’s rail in a storm. She could feel herself contract inside, hard, harder; she wanted to pull… something into herself, grip it, encompass it. And then the inchoate desire imploded in spasms, hot waves moving from her cunt outward and upward, and when the chamber took shape round her again and the ringing in her ears died he was still between her thighs, licking gently.

He lifted his head. He looked as stunned as he had when she had kissed the tip of his cock. Then he seemed to gather his wits, and he pressed a kiss against the inside of her savaged right thigh before rising on the bed.

She reached down and took his cock in her hand again. “I wanted— I wanted to pull it into me,” she said, her voice a stream full of gravel.

He seemed not quite able to catch his breath. He licked at his lips, then he had a knee between her thighs and was bearing down against her, his hand invisible between the two of them. She felt him pressing against her, then a stretching feeling— 

“Aah!”

She had heard men in the Army boast of breaching virgins, often describing the girls’ evident pain with cruel delight. She’d assumed they’d spoken of rapine, not of willing trysts.

“Am… sorry,” he breathed against her ear. He was partly inside her, partly not. “Try to… relax, not clench. Better the... next time, I promise.”

She nodded and tried to draw her knees further apart, forced her muscles not to tighten against him as he tried to drive further inward. There was the feel of something giving way, and then he was thrusting in and out unimpeded, as he had done between her clamped thighs. She was sore inside, but, she thought, it could be borne. Especially if she concentrated on Esca’s face, his tightly closed eyes, his teeth grazing his lower lip, his occasional soft moan. As she had when they lay among the enemy, she drew her hands from his shoulders down his breast, feeling the sleek muscles tremble under her fingers and palms.

“You are so beautiful,” she said softly. He didn’t reply, but she saw the colour rise in his cheeks. Then it seemed to suffuse him, the blue swirls standing out on the reddened flesh, and from that and the tremours of his thighs against hers she knew he was close. His thrusts grew shorter and more violent, and he sought out her mouth only to groan hard and heavy against it as he began to spend.

She held him through it, returning wild gasping kisses with infinite gentleness, one hand against his back and the other his scalp. There was a hot wetness inside her that was not her own. He collapsed against her, all his strength in the tight band of his arms round her, the rest of him limp and damp against her skin.

They lay still in that manner for a while. While his eyes were closed, she studied his face, as close as she had ever seen it: the fine strands of hair plastered to his forehead, the pleasing soft golden-brown of his brows and lashes, the handful of faint freckles that dusted the tops of his angular cheekbones. She thought of brushing the damp hair back, but she was loath to startle him. She thought she could lie under him and look at his face forever.

Of course, she could not. Eventually his eyes opened. She thought she had never seen such a beautiful smile before, and this time it was she who drew her fingertips over his lips. He kissed them gently, and then he withdrew from her and settled beside her.

A thought occurred to her. “Did I bleed?”

“Just a drop or two. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“I’d heard—” She hesitated.

“—that virgins bleed in great gouts? Would I be correct in guessing that you heard this from braggarts?”

“You would,” she admitted.

He sighed sharply as he pulled her closer against him. “Some were rapists, I’m sure. Some liars, possibly virgins themselves. And then there are those whose own right hands probably tell tales of their owners’ amatory inadequacies.” She shook with suppressed laughter, and she felt him smile against her shoulder.

“We should sleep,” he said, his voice soft. “We have one last week of travel before us.”

“One last week,” Flavia repeated. She remembered how eager she had been to ride out, all those months ago. She could barely remember that emotion, so eager was she now to return to the South and not leave it for a good long while. To sit in the atrium with her uncle and Esca and talk for hours over good wine. To ride out to the Downs and mark out the land they would raise a farm on.

Rich and gentle as that land was, the farm would not be her father’s farm. The hills would bear no wine-grapes that would survive a British winter, but they would be soft and rolling just the same, and like her forebears she would learn to bring crops up out of them. Its rivers would not be as warm and lazy as the Arbia, but they would be sparkling silver threads that murmured softly and whose waters tasted the way pure crystal rang. There would be no olive-trees, wild or otherwise, from whose wood Esca could shape little beasts for their children to play with. But there would be birch-trees, and alder-trees, and rowan-trees with their creamy, musky-sweet blossoms.

The steady, warm exhalations against her shoulder told her that Esca had dropped off to sleep. Flavia would not be long behind, she knew. But she took a last sleepy moment to raise her right hand and regard her father’s ring. It would sit on the hand of her eldest child, son or daughter, once she had crossed the Lethe to meet her father and Guern and all the brave men who’d fallen at her side. She wondered how many generations, dark-complected Romans and fair-faced Britons and some sturdy hybrid of both someday, would wear this ring after her.

Then she leaned over, blew out the candle, settled against Esca, and gave herself over to dreams of a future in a beautiful, bracing land.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic draws on both the book and the movie. I've been picking at it for about three years, and I just decided it was time to post it already. I've done basic research, but I don't promise 100% historical accuracy. Let's just say that, leaving aside any issues of Flavia's gender and how she hid it from the Army, it's at least as accurate as the book. Let alone the movie.


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